p 



SERMONS FOR 

THE GREAT DAYS 

OF THE YEAR 

Rev. RUSSELL H. CONWELL, d.d. 



SERMONS FOR 

THE GREAT DAYS 

OF THE YEAR 



BY 



Rev. RUSSELL H. CONWELL, d.d. 

MINISTER AT THE TEMPLE, PHILADELPHIA 

Author of "Acres of Diamonds^' etc* 




NEW XSJr YORK 
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 






C i\^ 



Copyright, 1922, 
By George H, Dor an Company 



PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



JIJL24'?? 



©CI.Afi81057 



I 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 



I New Year and Debt . . « r. 9 
(ROMANS XIII 17.) 

•-""II Saint Valentine's Marriage Re- 
form . . . ■., ^.3 . r.j 22 

(MATTHEW XXV : I.) 

III Abraham Lincoln . . ^ >; 38 

(ecclesiastes VII 128, 29.) 

IV George Washington Day r.i [. 56 

(revelation XIV : 1 3.) 

y Palm Sunday's Sacrifice .j « l*] 7i 
(JOHN XII :i3.) 

VI Easter . .. . « r.i « « 89 

(LUKE XXIV :32.) 

' VII Mother's Day . ., ^ ci m « 107 

(MATTHEW Xi:il.) 

VIII Use of Decoration Day .j «, l*: 123 
(luke 11:14.) 

IX Sure to Blunder . .. >] ^ >j 138 

( ISAIAH xl:3i.) 

X ^'Graduation Thoughts'^ . r.i w 144 

(DEUTERONOMY XXX : I9, 20.) 

XI The American Flag ,., ^. ^.j co 158 
(the acts XXII :28.) 



vi Contents 

PAGE 

XII Harvest Home . • . . . 177 
(genesis 1:12.) 

XIII ''Go Forward''— A Rally Day 

Sermon 189 

(exodus XIV : 1 5.) 

XIV Thanksgiving Sacrifice . . • 198 

(psalms cvii:22.) 

XV A Christmas Thought . . . 213 

(MATTHEW VII : II.) 



SERMONS 

FOR THE GREAT DAYS 

OF THE YEAR 

I 
New Year and Debt 

(ROMANS XIII 7) 

I WILL make up in briefness what I lack in illus- 
tration in order that you may not go into the 
New Year without the lesson I had in mind to leave. 
It is time that we were thinking of the first of 
January, and so to-night, I turn your attention to the 
13th chapter of Romans, and the 7th verse: 

^'Render therefore to all their dties; tribute to 
whom tribute is due, custom to whom custom, fear 
to whom fear, honor to whom honor. 

''Owe no man anything, but to love one another ^'^ 

Any one who sleeps overnight with money in his 

pocket which is overdue to some one else, is a thief. 

May I repeat that sentence : "any one who sleeps 

9 



10 Sermons for Great Days 

OVER NIGHT WITH MONEY IN HIS POCKET WHICH 
IS DUE TO SOME ONE ELSE IS A THIEF." 

Again, any man who makes an unnecessary present 
on Christmas when he owes an honest debt, is also 
a thief. I need not repeat that, because we all see 
it the first time. 

In the Bible, in setting forth the character of the 
Christians of the early Church at a time when it 
was necessary especially that men should clearly rep- 
resent the truth, it was set forth very distinctly: 
*'Owe no man anything, but to love one another." 

At the end of the year we generally take an ac- 
count of stock, to find out whether we owe or do 
not, and it is necessary for a man who would live 
rightly with himself, his family, his neighbors and 
his God, that he should frequently take very careful 
account, and especially at this, the end of the year. 

*^Owe no man anything." I may explain what 
perhaps is clear to most of you, that when the Bible 
exhorts us to "owe no man anything," it does not 
say you should not have a mortgage on your house ; 
it does not say you should not give a note; it does 
not say that you should not borrow money. It is the 
extremist who interprets things in that way. No 
man *'owes" anything that isn't due, in a moral or 
religious sense. That is the true interpretation. No 
man can be said to owe anything which is not yet 
due. You are under no moral obligation to pay a 



New Year and Debt 1 1 

man a note six months before it is due, but the day 
it becomes due you owe it, and this it is that the 
Bible says we must not owe any man ; it means that 
we must not have any overdue notes, any overdue 
promises, any unfulfilled pledges, which should have 
been paid the day before. 

''Owe no man anything'' is as distinct a command 
of God as any of the Ten Commandments, and life 
becomes a continually harassing thing to a person 
who does owe. Any man or woman v/ho owes what 
he cannot pay is in slavery; we all know that, and 
he who runs in debt without seeing that he is able to 
pay it when it comes due, comes under the condemna- 
tion of God, so that he may be declared a thief. It 
is stealing, pure and simple, only by a roundabout 
method. So I need not enforce that thought, as I 
think we all understand that the Lord commands 
every disciple of His to keep out of debt, to keep 
out of that position where he owes anything that he 
cannot pay. 

I have often been asked by friends if I be- 
lieved that the curse of God really rested upon people 
who had committed some unpardonable sin, and it 
is too wide a subject and too deep for me to explain, 
and yet I have a very strong inclination to believe 
that under certain circumstances God does let His 
curse descend upon men, and that it remaineth with 
them ever after they have committed some terrible 



12 Sermons for Great Days 

sin ; and one of the greatest sins is not to pay what a 
man owes, and to pay it at the time he agreed to pay 
it. It is not enough, in God's sight, to pay a debt to- 
morrow that is due to-day, or to go to bank the day 
after to meet a note that was due the day before. 

In order to set before the world an example that 
should bring it to Christ, the Apostle saw very clearly 
the need in that church, in the very beginning of the 
Church of Christ, for him to lay down this irre- 
vocable law: 'Thou shalt owe no man anything,^' 
and if a man does run in debt, he certainly comes 
under the curse, in a sense, of the living God. 

But I cannot say that curse is something that re- 
maineth forever over a man, and I am sure it may 
not. For if he repents sincerely and will turn unto 
the Lord, he will, of course, be forgiven. But I 
remember a personal incident which illustrates 
this point. I was working for $15 a week. I had 
a wife and two children. My pay came to me 
every Saturday at one o'clock. I know what it is 
for a working man to go around at one o'clock to get 
his pay ; I know what it is for him to go to the win- 
dow for his envelope, and to take out the money 
which he has counted upon all week, and which his 
wife has carefully estimated upon until they know 
where every penny of it is to go. These simple inci- 
dents come into every one of your lives, or else I 
would not allude to this. One day father and mother 



New Year and Debt 13 

told us they wanted to have son and wife and grand- 
children come home over a Sunday, and as the Mon- 
day following was a holiday, it would give them two 
days at home. Our home was some distance from 
the great city, and so the young man, and his wife, 
and the two children talked over their visit to grand- 
father and grandmother — they had not seen them for 
a long time, and the grandmother had not seen one 
of the children at all. So they decided that they 
would go the next Saturday, at the close of the 
week's work, which ended at twelve o'clock, and take 
the train leaving at 2 130 ; and thus go into the coun- 
try and visit the old folks. They had written weeks 
before that they were coming, grandfather had ar- 
ranged that a team should come to the station — • 
everything was arranged, just as you have done it 
many times. The children were carefully dressed, 
and lunch was put up, for we could not afford to 
buy any on the way, and my wife and the two chil- 
dren went to the station. I went about my duties in 
the morning after breakfast, and I had told them 
that I would meet them at the station at two o'clock. 
I went around to the paying office at one o'clock as 
usual, and the clerk was not in. He was out to a 
baseball game, but they said he would ''be back 
pretty soon." Being a relative of the proprietor, he 
could do some things that others could not. So I 
sat around that office till the train went out, and 



14 Sermons for Great Days 

burst into tears. There was no other train that day 
but one that would get us there late in the night, or 
perhaps the next morning. But he did not come at 
all, and I walked down to the railroad station and 
told my broken-hearted wife that we could not go. 
I had not the money to buy a ticket, and did not 
know any friends that I could borrow it from, so 
we turned back, walked up those desolate streets, 
and ate our cold lunch in the tenement where we 
lived, and all the next day and the following holiday 
was a funeral to us. We could not go, we did not 
go, and there is hardly a sadder chapter in the life 
of that poor old man's heart to-night than to think 
how his wife and children, and father and mother, 
were disappointed because the bookkeeper did not 
pay those wages at the time they should have been 
paid. He did not pay the debts that should have 
been paid at the time he should have paid them. I 
did not wish him any harm. But I left the employ 
of that company, in the Providence of God: or I 
would not have been here. 

Every commandment of God has attached to it 
a promise, and a punishment, and he who breaks it, 
and breaks it ruthlessly for selfish purposes, seems 
to come under some visitation of the curse of 
God; good fortune never comes his way; hard luck 
is always his experience, and there is nothing in 
human life that brings so much general sorrow as 



New Year and Debt 15 

the failure of man to pay his honest debts. The 
Bible here declared distinctly that thou shalt render 
^'tribute to whom tribute'' is due. Oh, what a far- 
reaching command that was, when you think of the 
people of the East, under the terrible Roman Gov- 
ernment, compelled by taxation to pay so large a 
share of maintaining that great military system of 
that day ! When we find that Apostle telling them 
that they must pay that tribute, which to a great 
extent was unjust, he is going a long distance, and 
my mind hesitates, my conscience trembles on the 
verge of advice like that. If I were, like the Jew, 
under tribute to the Roman Government which had 
held my nation by mere military force, I question 
whether I would be following Christ with fullness 
of heart, and pay cheerfully the taxes they de- 
manded of me. That is an extreme line, and when 
the Apostle goes so far as to declare that they 
ought even to pay that tribute, then he sweeps every- 
thing; there can be nothing beyond that demand. 
He also said, "You are to pay your custom house 
all that is due." What a universal thing it is for 
people coming from other countries to try to escape 
the custom-house duties. But they never make any- 
thing by it; they always lose, because God sets the 
current of His Providence against them, and while 
nothing seems to be open or distinct, yet by placing 
themselves in a position of defrauding the Govern- 



l6 Sermons for Great Days 

ment, they have placed themselves in such a rela- 
tion with the nation, and v^ith themselves, that they 
are ever out of accord, never in the right place at 
the right time. So the Bible declares that it is our 
duty to pay customs, so long as the Government of 
the land lays a tax upon goods brought in. 

Then it goes on to say that you must not ov^e 
any man anything; you must pay your taxes. But 
there are often men who think they are honest and 
upright, v^ho would escape, if possible, the payment 
of their share of the expenses of the city, or of the 
State, in the payment for sidewalks, streets, or the 
protection of the police for their comfort — they 
would not pay what was their due. 

This disposition is sometimes found in a Qiris- 
tian church. 

There lived at Avon, N. Y., two of the noblest 
Christian men it has ever been my good fortune to 
meet. One of those two men died last week at 
Avon, and I had never known their inside history 
before. But Mr. Puffer and his brother-in-law A^ent 
into partnership forty-one years ago. They bought 
a farm and they went to raising cattle, and selling 
certified milk for invalids and infants, and those 
two men lived together for forty-one years, until 
Mr. Puffer died last week, without a separate ac- 
count — all having the same pocketbook for forty- 
one years. They dealt in large things; they ran 



New Year and Debt 17 

great enterprises, and each one brought up his own 
family, and I sat last week in the parlor of that 
great mansion, at each end of which lived the fam- 
ilies of these people, and neither of them had a 
separate bank account. I felt the sublimity of the 
situation. They had great enterprises in Europe; 
they had factories in Germany ; one of the men most 
prominent in Western New York, the other still liv- 
ing, Mr. Markham, is one of the grand old men of 
that State. The ministration of the children is sweet 
to behold. I believe they told me that those two 
men never had a single angry word with each other, 
and the families lived with each other with all that 
sweetness, with no quarrel ever having come up to 
separate them. Before the wife of one of them 
died a few years ago, she said to me : "Pray that I 
may live; I am not afraid to die; I love God and I 
believe in Jesus Christ, and He has forgiven my 
sins. But I want to live on for my husband's sake. 
He has been so kind to me. Oh," she said, 'T feel 
so grateful to God for my husband, and I cannot 
bear to let him want for any ministrations that I 
could give him. I feel that God has been so merci- 
ful to me in giving him to me that I could hardly 
ask for more. But I do want you to pray that I 
may live on to minister to him, for his great good- 
ness to me.'' When the ideal of this commandment 
is carried out, and we appreciate our obligations to 



1 8 Sermons for Great Days 

our fellowmen to the full, then there will arise that 
respect for God and love for each other that makes 
life so beautiful, and brings heaven indeed to earth. 
How strong is the man who realizes his ob^'-^ations! 
Once I visited the little kingdom of Mc^^^xnegro, 
which now stands again as the key of Europe. That 
brave little kingdom of Montenegro ! Germany with 
her great army conquered Servia and has come up 
to the rocks and valleys and hills of little Monte- 
negro ! Even so came Napoleon with his conquering 
army ; coming from splendid victories, believing that 
he would sweep the east, hoping to go even to Baby- 
lon, with his great army, numbering more than that 
German army. Like the German Emperor, he had 
been training his army for many years, yet when 
Napoleon came up to the rocks of Montenegro — 
''Thus far shalt thou go," said the God of battles, 
*'and no further," and he was obliged to retreat be- 
fore the little kingdom, not half the size of Pennsyl- 
vania. Many a battle has been fought there since, 
and they have come up to Montenegro again and 
again. Only ten years since the Turk came up there, 
but they were compelled to stop. Montenegro has 
no great castles ; Montenegro has no great fortresses ; 
Montenegro has no 15-inch guns. Oh, no! But 
when the victorious army of the German tyrant, with 
all their wealth of forty years of discipline, came 



New Year and Debt 19 

up to the foot of the mountains of Montenegro, the 
newspapers said yesterday "they had stopped there." 
As 'we think of ''preparedness" in this country, we 
must nember that the best preparedness on earth 
is the ^ eparation of brains and heart, which is worth 
more than guns. Yes, though we might need them, 
without heart patriotism working together, love of 
country, brotherhood among ourselves, we will be 
worth nothing, even though we have a larger navy 
and a mighty army. Little Montenegro! Watch 
that kingdom! They love each other; they are 
brothers indeed. I visited that capital of that little 
kingdom, and everywhere courtesy of those moun- 
taineers for each other, and kindness toward their 
friends and their children, the sense of obligation to 
take better care of their friends' orphans, than they 
would of their own children, made it a place in- 
spiring to visit, and filled us full of esteem, and you 
felt humanity was higher and grander there in those 
mountains, underneath those snowy peaks than any- 
where else on the face of the earth. The Monte- 
negran believes that God has given him that coun- 
try ; thanks God for that country, and he believes he 
is under obligation to his fellowmen for continual 
assistance. Those mighty snow storms, as they send 
their awful avalanches down the mountain sides, 
bring often distress and suffering to those people, 
but they help each other and as the poor people are 



20 Sermons for Great Days 

more helpful to each other than the rich ever are, so 
the Montenegrans love each other, and are interested 
in each other's happiness and in each other's home. 
While they have their schools and their churches and 
are a very progressive, intelligent people, and the 
queen of Italy is the daughter of the king of that 
little country, they do love each other, and their 
thanksgivings are continual. I went into their ca- 
thedral, in that capital city, and the songs they sang, 
the bright, happy faces that I looked upon as they 
praised God were so in contrast with what I had 
seen across the water that I could not help but mark 
it. They love their country, and they feel indebted 
to each other, and feeling that indebtedness makes 
them magnificent specimens of heroes, of patriots, 
and of real Christians. I believe that the great tide 
of war will break again on the foot of the rocks of 
Montenegro, because those brave men stand so to- 
gether like those that stood at Thermopylae. 

The time has come when we are at the end of 
the year, and we will come to take an account of our- 
selves with God. Let us remember when the first of 
January comes around that we owe much to God for 
all the blessings that He has given us through the 
year, for friends who have been raised up for us; 
for opportunity to do what Christ taught us to do; 
for health and strength and education, and for the 



New Year and Debt 21 

fact that God has given us Jesus Christ as a propitia- 
tion for our sins. 

Let us take a very careful account of ourselves 
at the end of this year, and feel deeply, sincerely, our 
obligation to God, and don't let the first of January 
come until we have paid our debt, or secured its pay- 
ment through Jesus Christ. 

Let not the sun go down on any debt that you can 
pay, and let not the New Year come on with any 
bill unpaid which you can pay, and with all things, 
pay your debt to God; pay it with humility, pay it 
with repentance, pay it with prayer, pay it with love 
for God and love for mankind, and begin the New 
Year square with mankind and square with God. 



II 

St. Valentine s Marriage Reform 

(MATTHEW XXV :i) 

IN the story of the wise and foolish virgins which 
I read this evening, in the 25th chapter and the 
1st verse, Jesus said : 

''Then shall the kingdom of heaven be likened 
unto ten virgins, which took their lamps, and went 
forth to meet the bridegroom." 

It is Jesus' description of a wedding. You will 
notice in all the history of the Saviour's life on earth 
His references to anything were ever to those of the 
very highest type. His thoughts were pure as the 
light from the sun, and the illustrations which He 
used were in themselves helpful and inspiring in 
every possible direction. 

It was a wonderful parable; though I am not here 

to speak of the parable or its story, but simply of 

one of its suggestions. Of all the characters in 

forms of beauty, of all that has been condensed 

into a few expressions of wisdom or poetry, of the 

marvelous and the majestic, there is found nothing 

finer, nothing more eloquent than Jesus' reference to 

a wedding. He refers to it as being an institution in 

22 



St. Valentine s Marriage Reform 23 

which His Heavenly Father is interested, in which 
He Himself has taken such especial interest that 
He allowed it to be put on record that the first 
miracle He ever performed was in the turning of 
water into wine at a wedding in Galilee. His rev- 
erence for the marriage ties, His references to home 
and childhood, and to all the associated domestic 
loveliness which gathers around a dwelling where 
love is, are full of that spirit which lifts the heart 
unto God. Wonderful, wonderful Saviour of man- 
kind! 

He says that there was a marriage feast, and that 
ten virgins were invited, and five were admitted and 
five kept out. He uses marriage, its occasion, its 
ceremonies, and its sacredness to enforce His im- 
portant theological thought. Why was my atten- 
tion called to it this evening? Because yesterday 
was St. Valentine's Day. While this generation 
seem to have forgotten the purposes for which St. 
Valentine's Day was first celebrated, it is an occa- 
sion that calls attention to the marriage of men and 
women, to home life and child life, and to all the do- 
mestic felicities that are connected with such rela- 
tionships. St. Valentine's Day has become an occa- 
sion when people send ludicrous pictures from one 
to another or try to surprise each other with some 
anonymous communication, and oftentimes send 
insult. Yet when that day was instituted there was 



24 Sermons for Great Days 

no thought more beautiful above the Saviour's 
description than was that which led St. Valentine 
to devote himself to this particular work. 

St. Valentine's Day was first observed by that 
saint of the third century who loved the birds so 
well. There are a great many improbable stories 
told concerning him. But that he was actually a real 
character there seems to be no reason to doubt. 
That the birds obeyed him may not in any sense 
be true, though he may have trained them as mod- 
em men have done until he could understand them 
and they him as few people could do. Anyhow his 
study of the birds that flew from tree to tree, which 
made their nests in the spring and taught their 
young to fly later in the season, which sang to each 
other from bough to bough, and that supported and 
helped each other through their domestic felicities 
and domestic trials, made them to him an object of 
great interest. He said, "God made the birds as a 
particular expression of his love of the beautiful," 
and to those who have given attention to such things 
there is scarcely anything more interesting than to 
look upon the habits or the customs or the plumage, 
or hear the song of the birds. You who have not 
watched them should watch them. 

St. Valentine's Day, the 14th day of February, 
was observed m the first place because it was the 
especial day when in that Eastern land the birds 



St. Valentine s Marriage Reform 25 

chose their mates. It was on that day, or very near 
that day, when in that climate or that region the 
birds selected their companions for life. The birds 
have one wife, one husband, and each was selected 
for life. A bird is never married the second time. 
I remember in the country a few years ago that one 
of my neighbors either by accident or design, I 
think by accident, killed a little house swallow, and 
the nest of those two swallows was in the comer of 
his veranda. The other bird, the wife, whose eggs 
had not yet hatched, sat on the side of the nest, and 
called, and called. Night and day her voice was 
heard calling for the loved and lost. Had he aban- 
doned her? Or had he been killed? Where lay his 
body? O sweet bird! how tender, how touching, 
how mournful that sweet call. One morning after 
the calls had ceased they clambered up to the nest 
to see if she had gone, and there she lay dead upon 
her unhatched eggs. She had wept herself to death. 
Those who have studied the life of birds and their 
matrimonial relationship find in it the most excel- 
lent type, the highest form of human marriage. 

St. Valentine, by whom that day was first ob- 
served, and who tried to teach all the people of 
Christendom to observe it, made it not only the 
topic of his observation, but used it as an exhorta- 
tion for human marriage. In that land of St. Valen- 
tine they established a custom (it may have been a 



26 Sermons for Great Days 

law), that on the 14th day of February young 
people were to choose their mates for a year of 
acquaintanceship; that is, they were to become, in 
a sense, experimentally engaged to be married on 
the 14th day of February. Then for a year they 
were to improve opportunities for social and intel- 
lectual acquaintanceship, and if in a year they found 
themselves fitted for each other, or loving each 
other in the sincerest and divinest way, they were to 
be married a year later, thus requiring of all young 
people a year of waiting before they decided to be 
married. It was the hope of St. Valentine, as it was 
of his contemporaries, that they could make the 
whole Church of God on earth observe that custom 
for the good of humanity. If it had been observed 
we can see that it would have been a great boon for 
humanity. 

St. Valentine's Day has been so diverted from the 
original purpose that men have altogether forgotten 
what it did mean ; oh, the sadness of it. The sadness 
of the 4th of July that becomes a mere time for 
sports, or the exhibition of absurdities ; Oh, the sad- 
ness of the turning away of Decoration Day from 
the solemn laying of flowers upon the graves of the 
heroic dead to the playing of baseball, dancing, and 
to all forms of sports ! Oh, the sadness of turning 
Thanksgiving Day into anything but a day of thanks- 
giving, and the turning of the Sabbath into anything 



St. Valentine s Marriage Reform 27 

but that which brings to the mind sacred and beau- 
tiful associations! It is a sad, sad thing. Among 
the saddest desecrations of Satan upon the good of 
mankind has been the change on St. Valentine's 
Day. 

The tendency of mankind to be profane seems to 
be innate in the human nature. Profanity consists 
in far more than simply taking the name of God in 
vain. It consists in an individual heart purpose to 
make ridicule or scorn of those things that should 
be regarded as sacred for the sake of human char- 
acter and human love. It is just as sacrilegious and 
just as profane to speak disrespectfully of the mar- 
riage tie as it is to use the name of God in vain, for 
it expresses precisely the same character. If one 
go before the white throne of God to be examined 
as to what he has been he will find that profanity 
means something far wider than in the mere location 
of it to the use of certain words. It means in the 
way in which a man looks upon all that is divine 
and sacred. 

When this orchestra was playing that magnificent 
hymn in this last piece to-night, amid all these sac- 
red associations that make a hymn so appropriate, so 
musical, if you had treated it with disrespect or re- 
garded it with scorn you would have been profane 
in the same sense in which it is profane to speak of 
the sacred and lovely name of God with disrespect. 



28 Sermons for Great Days 

The ordinance or the ceremony of marriage, or 
rather the spirit of the marriage tie, is one of those 
divine things that was established of God from the 
beginning, in which every heart feels all that is sac- 
red welling up into the worship of God. No man 
ever feels drawn so near to the Almighty, no man's 
soul is ever filled so full of all that inspires to the 
godly and angelic as a young man who becomes en- 
gaged to be married to one worthy of him, and he 
worthy of her, and looks forward to the time when 
they shall have a home. You cannot express the 
terms of heaven in finer language than in that simple 
word "'home." 

This observance of St. Valentine's Day carries 
with it a great lesson, and I hope you may never see 
the day again without remembering something of 
what was said to-night whether you forget the 
speaker and the place or not. 

When marriage began among mankind it began 
like the birds, with the instinct of the birds. They 
were to choose each one mate, live together all their 
lives, love each other, bring up their families to- 
gether, work together for their offspring until their 
oflFspring could fly away and care for themselves, 
and choose again for themselves. So like the birds 
were the original instincts God gave to mankind. 

But evil has come in in some way. It has come 
into life with its impressions in ways we cannot 



St. Valentine s Marriage Reform 29 

fathom. It has come to be the work of Satan. The 
work of evil has been to try to bring reproach, or 
to bring disregard or disrespect for the marriage tie, 
and the marriage ceremony is losing its power now. 
Men care little, they say, for the ceremony. The 
ceremony in itself may be hypocritical, may be weak 
because it is hypocritical, and yet as the flower ex- 
presses the beauty of the designs of God, in the ob- 
servance of those formal ceremonies with the heart 
behind them is found the most important training 
for the worship of God and the love of mankind. 

Where it was that women ceased to be the equal 
of men we cannot see, but the Bible tells us that in 
the beginning Eve was made a help equal to man, 
a helpmate for man, so that God's evident first in- 
tention was that men and women should be com- 
pletely equal in all their rights, and each should be 
the sustainer of the other, so that both together 
might make a perfect one. God said, 'These twain 
shall be one,'' and being one each in his place or her 
place was to do their share to make a complete, beau- 
tiful, and divine home. But somewhere back in the 
ages the devil came in, and man began to own 
woman. A female child born into the world soon 
began to be regarded as mere property, to be a slave. 
In all the heathen nations of the world even now 
such is her position. As far back as we can go in 
the history of our own races we find that woman was 



30 Sermons for Great Days 

the slave of man, that she was property, that she was 
valued as worth so many cows, so many horses, so 
many pounds of silver, so many potatoes, or so many 
boats. Barter and exchange were made for her 
through all those early ages. When St. Valentine 
came in he recognized that. He attempted to re- 
form the idea that in the marriage ceremony or in 
the marriage relationship itself, woman was in any 
sense the inferior of man. But he did not succeed. 
The tide against him was too strong. Sacrilege and 
profanity have come in, and still creep into the 
Church, and maintain the things that mdicate the 
heathen state of life. 

For instance, the wedding ring is but a reminder 
of that heathen practice of buying a woman, and 
fastening a chain to her wrist. The ring that was 
welded upon her wrist has only become the ring that 
is put upon her finger now, to carry down through 
the ages, as it should not, the idea that a woman is 
the slave of man, consequently must wear a ring 
to be chained to him. 

St. Valentine also recognized the other thought 
preserved in our marriage ceremony of ''giving 
away'' a woman. In this age of intellectual equality, 
when men and women are regarding each other with 
a reverence that is certainly according to the teach- 
ings of God, how foolish it is to ask, "Who gives 
away this woman?" at the marriage altar. Who 



St. Valentine s Marriage Reform 31 

gives her away ? Who owns her ? Whose property 
is she? Who has given the bushel of potatoes for 
her. Who has given any property for her and ac- 
quired the right to sell her or give her away? St. 
Valentine was opposed to all those heathen customs. 
His idea was that like the birds they should mate 
together and make their bargains themselves. He 
did not believe that parents should make them. He 
believed that they should be allowed to come on the 
14th day of February and get so acquainted through 
the coming year that their own hearts should decide 
whether they ought to be married or not. 

He advocated the fact that the churches ever 
taught that real marriage is an inspiration of the 
spirit of God. The Catholic church is right in mak- 
ing it a sacrament of the Church, and it is right that 
everywhere it should be so regarded. No man can 
say he is married because he may have gone to the 
mayor, and gone through the civil service. He may 
have been to the cathedral and gone through the 
religious service, and he may have gone to the Prot- 
estant church and gone through another ceremony — 
through three ceremonies, and yet not one of those 
three made them man and wife in the sight of God. 
The more ceremonies they require the less likely it is 
they are married. The real marriage, according to 
St. Valentine, is Christ's marriage — a marriage of 
the soul, of the inner instinct that comes directly into 



32 Sermons for Great Days 

a young man or woman from God. If any instinct is 
given direct from heaven, it is the mating instinct be- 
tween young men and young women, and it is right 
that they should get acquainted with each other. I 
beHeve in schools that bring them together, in col- 
leges that bring them into acquaintanceship, and in 
all of those gatherings where they mingle each with 
the other with that perfect and modest freedom by 
which they may become intimately acquainted with 
each other. 

But acquaintanceship is not enough. Unless there 
is a gift of God of the spirit in marriage it is no true 
marriage. That was Christ's representation of what 
a marriage was when He spoke of the marriage 
feast that was a real marriage feast. He meant a 
feast where the bride and bridegroom were so 
brought together by the providence of God, and so 
inspired by the spirit of divine love that they knew 
in their own souls that they were intended of God 
for each other from eternity to eternity. 

If the Church took that view of it, as it seems to 
be Christ's view of the marriage ceremony, how im- 
portant it is that we as followers of Jesus Christ 
should teach and by example inspire the thought of 
the great and awful sacredness of marriage. 

In what does real marriage consist? It consists 
in the love of two hearts for each other so deep 
and so sure that each would sacrifice for the other 



St. Valentine s Marriage Reform 33 

his own life at any time. To be worthy of being 
married at all requires that love should be so great 
that they could live separate from each other an 
entire lifetime if it were for the value or the good 
of the other so to do. The love that is a real love 
is a deep abiding affection given of God, and like 
unto the angels of God. That is real marriage. The 
ceremony should go with it that the world may recog- 
nize it, that they may themselves be treated as living 
in that relationship. It is a horrid, murderous thing 
for people to get married, to come into the marriage 
relationship in any form tmless their hearts have so 
united that they cannot do otherwise. As the apostle 
said, *T cannot but preach the Gospel,'' so neither 
could they do otherwise than to be married. They 
could not think in real marriage that any other state 
was possible. You cannot make a business arrange- 
ment of a real marriage. 

Then the question that comes, to which I can 
make only a moment's reference to-night, is that of 
divorce. When is divorce allowed? We are asked 
that question as teachers, and preachers, and the 
priests are often asked, *'What is the excuse that is 
right for divorce?" The Saviour says that if two 
people at the time of their marriage think they love 
each other as they should, or if one of them does 
love fully and the other does not, if in after time they 
find they cannot live together in peace, and they are 



34 Sermons for Great Days 

so unfitted to each other that hfe is but a misery, 
showing that their marriage was not a real and 
divine one, that cause, is fornication. That is what 
it means. It is a spiritual thing. If a husband is 
at heart untrue to his wife, does not support her, or 
care for her, and hates her or abuses her, he is 
guilty of the Saviour's interpretation of fornication, 
and for that cause divorce should be allowed. While 
I would not advocate divorce, while I think it is very 
dangerous to suggest it lest people in spasms of 
anger should avail themselves of it when love still 
continues, and when they afterwards will bitterly 
regret it, yet when the Saviour laid down the law 
of divorce He laid it down as wise when there was 
evidence that the marriage itself was not that spirit- 
ual affectionate eternal love of the hearts which 
should characterize a true marriage. Where that 
becomes apparent, although they have lived together, 
the Saviour admitted of a divorce, and the laws of 
the land seem to follow in the teaching of the Sav- 
iour in the provisions they make therefor. 

Divorce is an awfully sad thing because it ad- 
vertises to the world a great wrong, for there is 
no wrong so terrible, murder itself not more awful, 
than the marriage of two people who do not love 
each other. The sacrilege of it is as deep as hell, 
and the horror of it the angels of God themselves 
condemn. But a real marriage is a perfect heaven. 



St. Valentine s Marriage Reform 35 

It is heaven on earth. A real marriage in which all 
are equal, where the woman and the man in every 
respect are the equal of each other, and where there 
is no thought of compulsion, no question of law, no 
thought of it in the house where each serves the 
other with sacred and pure devotion, and never 
thinks of any obligations, customs, or laws because 
their two souls are so one that each is ever desirous 
to do for the other, — that is a heaven on earth. 
That is real marriage. No divorce can ever come 
in there. 

I advise St. Valentine's provision that young 
people wait. Take, not too long, but a year of wait- 
ing, as that is long enough, and in that time keep 
their good sense, and their worship of God, and ask 
for direction of the divine spirit, and decide not 
until the year has passed. When the year has passed 
if love be so strong that it is irresistible, if there be 
no impediment in the way which would do more 
harm than good, if there be no restriction either of 
human or divine law that would make the marriage 
a harm to the community or to the cause of God, 
then it is their duty before God to become united 
at the marriage altar, and set up their home. ^'In- 
crease and multiply'' was the first commandment 
of God to man, and it is the strongest instinct that 
is left with mankind. It is the greatest source of 
joy to be found on earth. 



36 Sermons for Great Days 

How thankful I am for the returning tide of good 
sense in the newspapers, in the books, and in the 
speech of people. For we have lately passed through 
a horrid state of accusation against men and women, 
as though this world was hastening into licentious- 
ness and low, degraded debauchery. I hope many 
of you have seen through it all that women were 
more true than all these stories made them appear, 
and that men were more true than we had repre- 
sented them to be. When you think that only one 
out of five hundred men and women in the cities, 
with all their temptations, ever visit or ever go into 
association with vile places, oh then the world is 
better than you think. Yes, it is more hopeful than 
you think. Think of the homes throughout the 
world; think of the millions happily married 
throughout the world ; think of the children that love 
their parents and the parents their children; and 
while your hearts go out in sympathy for the poor 
weak-minded who have fallen into those degraded 
conditions, and you should help them, yet your heart 
should swell with praise to God for the establishment 
of the marriage relationship, for the establishing of 
the homes of earth. Your effort should be to in- 
crease their number, and increase the reverence of 
mankind for them, so that marriage here on earth 
may be a tie that shall last on forever into the future 
eternities. 



St. Valentine s Marriage Reform 37 

BENEDICTION 

O Lord, bring soon about that day when women 
shall no longer be sold in marriage, when men shall 
no longer be sold in marriage, when that great re- 
lationship shall not be assumed for money, or for 
title, or because of influences extraneous to the heart. 
Hasten the time when Christ shall be so taught that 
all over the earth hearts shall be brought to choose, 
and when each shall find its own divine mate, and 
earth shall be a heaven, an open door, a vestibule to 
an eternal home of love on high. 

Hear our prayer, and grant us that benediction. 
We ask it in Christ's name. Amen. 



Ill 

Abraham Lincoln 

(ecclesiastes VII :28, 29) 

IN the two last verses of the 7th chapter of Ec- 
clesiastes is the wise observation in which the 
preacher says: 

^'That which my sduI seeketh I find not; one man 
among a thousand have I found, but a woman among 
all those have I found not. 

''Lo, this only have I found, that God hath made 
man upright; but they hftve sought out many m- 
ventions/^ 

The whole nation, during the last week, has been 
celebrating the birth of Abraham Lincoln, and it 
furnishes an excellent opportunity for one to point 
a moral or to apply a lesson of the Gospel. It is a 
very interesting thing, and a very profitable thing 
to read what the great editors and the great authors 
of the country write concerning that singular charac- 
ter, Abraham Lincoln. But it is very confusing to 
see how they differ in their estimate of the man, or 
the reasons they give for the place he holds in the 
esteem of the American people. 

38 



Abraham Lincoln 39 

It IS an interesting thing to find that such a char- 
acter, one who never joined the Church, who never 
made what people sometimes call an open profession 
of religion, should now be a hero of the Church, 
and his principles accepted as principles of genuine 
Christianity. 

It appears to me that the one man in a thousand 
for whom the preacher was looking is found in 
Abraham Lincoln but not because he differs from 
other men. It would be very useless for me to turn 
your attention again to this great man if it were not 
for the fact that the lesson can be very helpful. 

When a man attempts by poetry or oratory, or 
song, to put a man like him far up high on a pedes- 
tal, as though no man could ever approach him, 
they do a great deal of harm instead of good, and 
are disheartening those who might follow his foot- 
steps if they were encouraged to do so. I am not 
one of those who believe that Abraham Lincoln was 
so far above all the other men or was so different 
from other men that he could not be imitated now. 
I believe he can be followed. 

I lived in a day of great excitement in the Civil 
War, when every side of Abraham Lincoln's char- 
acter was brought under the microscope of public 
opinion, and I heard what was said against him, and 
I heard what people who underestimated him said, 
and I have lived these fifty years now, and we are 



40 Sermons for Great Days 

finding that the confused mind is becoming more 
and more clarified with each succeeding year. His 
influence grows, and his words are stronger now 
than they were when he died. His great speech at 
Gettysburg has become now the example of the 
highest form of oratory, and yet at the time it was 
delivered it received little applause. 

Why is it that his liberation of the slaves, which 
has become an inspiration to lovers of liberty the 
world over, at the time it was done, was regarded 
merely as a military necessity? I have asked this 
question of myself, thinking that you, with this 
Spiritual advice, might take a clear view which one 
should take of such a character, not for the purpose 
of entertainment or for discussion, but to point a 
Gospel lesson pure and simple. 

Abraham Lincoln did not differ so much from 
thousands of other men. There are certain circum- 
stances in his life which made him an excellent ex- 
ample of that in which he did differ from common 
men, and if I were to say to the young men who 
hear me speak or who may read my words that 
Abraham Lincoln was a strange, peculiar, God-given 
genius, and that when his image was cast, "the mould 
was broken," and that there never could be or never 
was another like Abraham Lincoln, I am simply 
saying to the young men, *'It is of no use for you 
to try." But if, on the other hand, we take that 



Abraham Lincoln 41 

reasonable view of the life of Abraham Lincoln that 
he was like other men, but especially used by the 
Providence of God, and that there are many things 
in his life worthy of imitation, we have furnished an 
incentive to the rising generation. This ought al- 
ways to be done. There is only one character that 
was ever on earth, that should be held up above the 
ambitions of young men and women. 

This text that I read confuses people. But it is 
a statement which I may put in other words — ^that 
God made a perfect man, and that since that day 
there has not been found a woman who has reached 
that standard in her attempt to make herself over 
into the image; and that since that day there has 
been f oimd only one man in all the thousands, and 
there has not one single woman been found by the 
writer who has been able to imitate that uprightness 
which God created in man in the first place. It 
seems to say that men have a right, by their manner 
of independence, to make themselves over into some- 
thing else which they desire to be. Like that 
preacher, I have never found a man that could build 
up the ideal figure and imitate the perfect upright- 
ness of the Second Adam. They have all failed, 
so far as I can see. 

Abraham Lincoln felt that he was not a perfect 
man. Why should we think so, when an age is 
passed and his enemies are silent, and his friends 



42 Sermons for Great Days 

have become more enthusiastic about him ; when we 
have not reached that state as a nation where we 
can extol him and worship him as the Chinese do 
their ancestors ? The lesson that comes down to us 
through the years is that he was the nearest to that 
ideal manhood, perhaps, in his closing years, of any 
known American. There may have been a more per- 
fect character of whom we did not hear, but Abra- 
ham Lincoln is an encouragement to every young 
man in this — that nearly every young man to-day 
has more advantageous circumstances in life than 
Abraham Lincoln ever had. 

Abraham Lincoln inherited nothing above the 
trials of life from his parents, in body, mind and 
spirit. Abraham Lincoln's race was that poor white 
race of Kentucky which has been found there in the 
years since. You may have read, or may have seen, 
if you have traveled in the South, those ''poor 
whites," lazy people, that lie around the grocery 
stores and who drink, who chew tobacco and swear 
and shoot each other occasionally when they have 
their family feuds. These poor white people of Ken- 
tucky remain, in a measure, something the same as 
they were in the days of Abraham Lincoln. But 
those men of the mountains, with valleys deep, with 
precipices steep, often made characters of a certain 
rugged, noble kind. Abraham Lincoln inherited 
nothing from his father and mother for which we 



Abraham Lincoln 43 

need claim praise. Less from his father than from 
his mother. It reminds me of Henry Ward Beecher 
saying of his church composed of eighteen members, 
that seventeen of them were women and the other 
was nothing. Abraham Lincoln was something. 
But his father was nothing. Abraham Lincoln in- 
herited no money ; he did not come into the world in 
possession of any funds with which to start him- 
self in life, or with which he could secure an educa- 
tion. I want to say to the young men who hear me, 
or who read what I am saying, that you have many 
advantages which Abraham Lincoln did not possess. 
Abraham Lincoln had no culture; he had no oppor- 
tunity to go to the schools up to the time he was 
19 years of age. As a boy he could not read or 
write, or scarcely scrawl his name. He had been 
brought up to hew wood and do odd jobs of various 
kinds, and lay around the grocery stores up to that 
time. He had consequently no helps such as men 
now have to make himself a great man. He there- 
fore lacked that culture and lacked that education; 
and he had many special misfortunes to hold him 
back which you do not have. 

He lived with his stepmother. His good mother, 
whom he remembered as a child, died early in life, 
and the poor boy was left to wander about, and 
oftentimes he had to live on crusts of bread, and 
his lazy, useless old father married again, and he 



44 Sermons for Great Days 

had a stepmother. His stepmother was always un- 
usually kind, and was indeed a help to him. But 
neither was she a cultivated person. While she knew 
more than his own mother, as far as reading, writ- 
ing and books were concerned, yet she was of that 
dull intellectual grade of Kentucky poor whites. 
There are no young men in all my acquaintances 
that have the disadvantages that he had. I don't 
believe in this Temple to-night any one can think 
of a boy 20 years of age that has the disadvantages 
which characterized Abraham Lincoln. So I say, 
it is encouraging to boys to find out that one, worse 
off than they, and having a father of less account 
than theirs, has risen to this high station and is re- 
ceiving the encomiums of the world. 

He was chastened in his youth — chastened by sor- 
row — sorrow of the deepest kind. Loss of his 
mother I have already mentioned and you have 
read his history and I need not detail it. It was 
sad. It left that grief over his childhood that went 
on down through the years. But perhaps the great- 
est chastening was that he was broken-hearted over 
the love of a woman. He was of that decisive 
character, a man who could love with a great heart, 
but I do not believe that he loved more than other 
men have loved ; I do not believe that his admiration 
for her whom he intended to marry was more sin- 
cere than other men ; I do not believe that he would 



'Abraham Lincoln 45 

have sacrificed more than you would sacrifice for 
the one you love. But to that life there came a chill, 
and he, instead of leading her to the altar, followed 
her, broken-hearted to the grave, and that first great 
stroke of sorrow chastened that boy; broke him 
down, reduced him to a state of grief and care- 
lessness of life that seemed never to have left him 
entirely. He never came out of it even in the dig- 
nity of the work he had to do. 

He lived in poverty all those years — indeed, he 
lived in poverty until he went to Congress, and even 
then he gave away so much of his small salary that 
he was oftentimes reduced to debt. He was always 
poor. 

He was chastened by defeat; by some very bitter 
defeats — not only defeats concerning marriage in 
his first and deepest love — not only there, but he was 
defeated again and again in his attempt to do some- 
thing for himself. He tried to carry on a store, and 
he was very soon so in debt that he was obliged to 
go out and split rails to pay up. When he closed up 
his store, he was elected captain of a military com- 
pany in the Black Hawk war, and before he saw 
any service the company was ordered to disband, and 
he enlisted as a private soldier. It is not often that 
we find a man is ^'promoted'' from captain to private. 
But it was the history of Abraham Lincoln, and 



46 Sermons for Great Days 

young men may have had like experiences in other 
directions, and it may have done them good. 

Then he determined to study law. As a lawyer 
he had no wide education, no wide reading. I do 
not see how any person would ever engage Abraham 
Lincoln as a lawyer when he first opened his office 
in Springfield, Illinois. His office was in a very 
poor building, the windows were broken, some of the 
portions of the doors were split, and they said his 
office was never kept very neat, for not many came 
to it, and he was obliged to sleep in it himself. 

To-day we ask the young men of our country to 
look at this character, which now stands before our 
country, whose monuments rise in almost every pub- 
lic square and park, and whose life and actions have 
filled libraries. Look at him, young ment Look! 
Your chance is far better than his! You have far 
greater talents than he had. You live in a time when 
the doors of progress are open, and you live in an 
hour when men can rise, and rise rapidly to attention 
and success. 

What was it that made Abraham Lincoln great? 
He was great; his influence was great. We must 
all admit that. But what was it that made him 
great — ^without special intelligence, or money, with- 
out education, culture or friends! What was it 
that led him to become the central figure in our his- 
tory, where he did certain deeds that impressed the 



Abraham Lincoln 47 

ages ? It IS reasonable for us t© discuss, in view of 
the Scriptural illustration, what it was that made 
him one great man. 

Many a disciple of Christ has tried to find in 
Abraham Lincoln a proof of the truth of his own 
creed, and maybe prove the tenets of his own church. 
But nevertheless, the great fact remains, that Abra- 
ham Lincoln, while he was in the habit of attending 
church, and while he read the Bible, and while he 
read religious books, and while he gave religious ad- 
vice, never allied himself in any close way with any 
one denomination of Christians. He kept himself 
aloof for the time. It does not seem to have been 
because of any choice on his part. It seems to have 
been a kind of modest under-estimation of himself, 
or a sense of his weakness, or lack of culture or 
money, that kept him from uniting with any Chri- 
tian church. Yet as a Christian he was one of 
God's ideal men. He was nearer to it than any 
American ever known. He was an unright man; 
uprightness was the peculiar characteristic of Abra- 
ham Lincoln. 

Now, a man may praise other men who have 
great gifts — men who have wrought with wonderful 
imagination in poetry ; we may praise great scientific 
men, great inventors — men who have read the stars, 
the great statesmen who steer the government 
through perilous waters, we may praise those men 



48 Sermons for Great Days 

because of some one individual invention or achieve- 
ment, all of them prominent, and all of them deserv- 
ing a great place. But in Abraham Lincoln there 
was that ideal aggregation of all the best traits of 
human character, making him one, great, round and 
noble figure, to which the world could look and give 
its praise ; because it lacked the inventions that make 
up the character of many men. 

A man may be a great inventor in words, or a 
great inventor in machinery, and because of that in- 
vention receive great praise. Why is it that Mr. Edi- 
son is not holding the same position in the estimation 
of the world that Abraham Lincoln held ? It is not 
because Edsion has less opportunities than Abraham 
Lincoln had, many helpful inventions and oppor- 
tunities have aided him; but Abraham Lincoln had 
no inventions to aid him. Some may write books. 
There may be Whittiers and Longfellows, and they 
may write books that attract the attention of men 
and women, and the admiration and love of the 
world, but that invention might be an outside inven- 
tion, something outside of themselves which they 
have done. But in the life of Abraham Lincoln there 
does not seem to be any one special thing which 
brought him to the place he occupies. He issued the 
Emancipation Proclamation and gave freedom to the 
slaves, and that's about all you emphasize of him. 
If you study his history and try to find some mighty, 



Abraham Lincoln 49 

gigantic outside thing, or invention, which he did 
to attract attention to himself you do not find it. He 
was too modest and lacked money to do it. There 
are no great issues in his life to which he ever could 
or did go. He was an ideal man, such as the great 
writer of Ecclesiastes is trying to suggest to us. 

He also tries here to suggest the ideal woman. 
I wonder what that ideal of his was? It does not 
seem to appear on the surface, although there are 
many places where he speaks of woman's noble 
characteristics. The last Chapter of Ecclesiastes 
presents a most wonderful picture of a certain 
woman of a certain race, in a certain place, with 
certain traits, and that is a wonderful ideal. 

The ideal man, as God made him is upright, and 
the word uprightness, when we get back to the He- 
brew, covers quite an extensive vocabulary. ''Up- 
rightness" means a man of a good heart. O, that's 
the fotmdation of human greatness, a great, loving, 
good heart. And that made Abraham Lincoln a 
great man, with the help of prayer to God. Abra- 
ham Lincoln was a man of prayer. Whether he 
went to church or not ; or read often the Bible or not ; 
whether he believed in this creed, or that or the 
other, one thing is sure that continually, like Wash- 
ington, he was a man of prayer. He believed in 
prayer and felt that his prayers would be answered 
as well as other people's who went to church more 



50 Sermons for Great Days 

than he did. He was a "good-hearted" man. O 
that means so much ! 

Milton could write the most wonderful poetry that 
was ever penned by man. But he had a weak char- 
acter. Nelson could say, ''England expects every 
man to do his duty/' and that phrase rang all over 
the world, and yet he could be a libertine, and when 
we look at many of our great men, even our own 
Franklin, we see some things that we mention under 
our breath. We find in every great man who has 
done some great thing or invented some great thing, 
some great defect of character. It is said that every 
great man has some peculiar weakness, and that is 
true very largely. If you find any man prominent 
in one way he always has some weakness. But Abra- 
ham Lincoln's character was an all-around good 
character. You do not find any man to assault his 
motives for moral uprightness. You could not ex- 
pect to find in the time that Abraham Lincoln lived 
any man who declared him to be dishonest. He was 
''Honest Old Abe," and he was a great man be- 
cause he had a good heart, and he was strictly honest 
and honorable. He was an ideal man, then, in his 
heart, and being an ideal. Christian hearted man, be- 
lieving in the teachings of Jesus and praying unto 
God for help in times of distress, he developed that 
all-around character, so that you may put up the 
moral statute of Abraham Lincoln upon the pedestal 



Abraham Lincoln 51 

of City Hall and go around it and examine it with 
every kind of microscopic instrument, and you will 
not find a flaw in that great, living, moral character, 
and that is the character that the Bible is ever en- 
deavoring to build up. God seems to show His hand 
in His determination to build up mankind into this 
perfect uprightness, of which the prophets had found 
only one in a thousand. It is to make men like 
Abraham Lincoln that the Scripture itself is in- 
tended. It is for that that we are ever to preach 
and teach and insist. He was a thoroughly honest 
good man. 

He was characterized by one other faculty, and 
that was wisdom ; the wisdom that is mentioned in 
Proverbs; the wisdom that is mentioned by Jesus 
Christ; that broad, every-day application of com- 
mon sense. That is real wisdom. Man may search 
into philosophy and go deep into all kinds of experi- 
ments ; he may discover some ; he may invent some- 
thing and call the attention of men to himself, but 
real wisdom is wisdom like that of Abraham Lin- 
coln, that sees every day some good in every man. 
He was a man who could recognize good in his 
enemies as well as in his friends ; who ever exercised 
his every-day common sense; who showed us that 
we ought to be forgiving to those who despite fully 
use us. The ideal man is the man who makes no 
unnecessary enemies, and who, if he has enemies, 



52 Sermons for Great Days 

tries to look upon that man in the same way as he 
would upon a friend. Abraham Lincoln's life was 
a special exposition of that disposition of forgive- 
ness and brotherly kindness. The kind position he 
took with reference to the people of the South was 
such as to bring down upon him the condemnation 
of those who supported Wendell Phillips. I knew 
him personally, and he often privately said bitter 
things against Abraham Lincoln because Mr. Lincoln 
spoke kindly of the South, and spoke of the people 
of the South as friends and never as enemies. In 
one of his great speeches he said, "They are not our 
enemies; they are our friends," and because he ap- 
proached the slavery question with common sense 
he had both sides and both extremes often opposed 
to him. He proposed, before the war began, that 
the government should raise money and buy the 
slaves and set them free. The North considered 
that the greatest possible foolishness and oppression, 
forgetting how many millions might be spent in the 
war, how many would go to death, and how great 
would be the depression in all the after years. They 
did not exercise common sense. But Abraham Lin- 
coln looked out upon the whole field, and regarded 
the Southern people as mistaken friends, and as 
friends who were mistaken he proceeded with his 
whole heart, and with a kindly spirit and determina- 
tion, to do precisely right, in bringing about the tri- 



Abraham Lincoln 55 

upmh of the cause of the Union, and when he was as- 
sassinated by a fooHsh fanatic, there was put a 
martyr's crown upon his life, that called attention to 
it so distinctly that it impressed its mark upon the 
ages as nothing else could do. So martyrs are ever 
honored, almost worshipped. When Abraham Lin- 
coln was murdered, with his good heart, his excellent 
intentions, his broad common sense, his statesman- 
ship, his death put God's seal upon those character- 
istics of the man who brought about iiie return of 
the South to the Union, through a teaching which 
has made them a solid glorious and permanent part 
of this great nation. 

Abraham Lincoln was an upright man such as 
cannot be made by clothing ; such as cannot be made 
by money, but which is made only by building upon 
the foundation of Christian faith, upon a large and 
loving heart. That heart had been broken, and hav- 
ing been broken it is fair to assume that God made 
him suffer, in order that he might be a better instru- 
ment for bringing about peace and prosperity to this 
great nation, and the setting up of a great people 
whose ideal he should be. Abraham Lincoln's faith 
and broad common sense showed him that this nation 
should lead all the nations of the earth in bringing 
them all up to that standard of Christian fellowship 
and brotherly love, where each should do unto the 
other as he would have the other do to him. 



54 Sermons for Great Days 

These, then, are the great characteristics in the 
life of Abraham Lincoln, his every-day sound judg- 
ment ; his great, loving soul ; his prayers to God and 
his faith in the ultimate triumph of right. With 
malice toward none, but with love for all, Abraham 
Lincoln set his faith in God, believing that righteous- 
ness would prevail, and that at last truth would tri- 
umph. That makes a great character. A small 
character that lives within its own narrow limits, 
thinks that all is going to the bad ; that evil is every- 
where extant, that the good are ever crushed and 
the wicked are ever prosperous, takes a small, un- 
commonsense view of life. But Abraham Lincoln 
was a broad character, who, having faith that all 
things were working together for good in the sight 
of God, and that somehow evil would be crushed 
and righteousness would prevail, became the giant 
man that he was, and his great influence came, not 
from the fact that he was a great statesman or a 
great soldier, or a great scientist, or a great scholar, 
or great in any one invention, but because of that 
all-pervading, permanent good character and broad 
common sense, that sublime purpose in life which 
goes with sincere faith in God. 

BENEDICTION" 

.O Lord! We read that Thy kingdom shall be 
found on earth with the 'men and w^omen whose 



Abraham Lincoln 55 

hearts are pure, and who love their fellowmen and 
reverence Thee. O Lord ! we thank Thee for Abra- 
ham Lincoln's great life, in that his heart was fiill 
of sympathy for the suffering and the needy, full 
of sweet humanity. We thank Thee for his broad 
wisdom, guiding him into channels of usefulness. 
Lord, raise up thousands more men like Abraham 
Lincoln. We ask that benediction, and ask it in 
Christ's name. Amen. 



IV 

George Washington Day 

(revelation XIV :i3) 

MY text this morning is in the 14th chapter of 
the book of Revelation : 

''And I heard a voice from heaven saying unto 
me. Write, Blessed are the dead which die in the 
Lord from henceforth: Yea, saith the spirit, that, 
they may rest from their labows; amd^ their work 
do follow themf' 

My thought this morning has not so much to do 
with this prophecy of everlasting life, as upon the 
words, "I heard a voice from heaven saying, Write." 
That has occurred many times in the history of the 
world. I read to you this morning that God told 
Moses to write, and we have read that God told 
the prophets to write, and we have read what He told 
the Apostles to write, so the whole Bible is some- 
thing written at the command of God. Yet, since 
the Bible has been finished, there have been times 
when men or women have been inspired by some spe- 
cial degree of the Divine Spirit, a genius conveyed 
from heaven itself, which commanded them to write; 

56 



George Washington Day 57 

and among those whom in the history of the world 
have seemingly been especially commanded from 
heaven to write was the great Father of His Coun- 
try, George Washington. 

As one studies the life of George Washington 
and reads what he wrote, he must come to the con- 
clusion that Washington, a hum^an being, within 
the limitations of human thinking, could never have 
written what he did write. He must have written 
beyond his own knowledge; beyond his own imagi- 
nation; he must have said things that were among 
the miraculous, or else there is no such thing as 
''miraculous.'' On this day, when we bring George 
Washington to mind, — and the nation never needed 
it more than it does now, — let us, as American citi- 
zens, as lovers of our country, and as lovers of 
truth, justice and God, — listen to something he said. 

I remember visiting General Lee after the close 
of the Civil War. General Lee was a fine, noble, 
lovely Christian man, a man of high purposes, and 
he was one of the great generals of the world. Al- 
though I fought on the other side, yet I always rev- 
erenced him as the Southern people reverenced 
Abraham Lincoln. At that time he said something 
that I had not heard said before. He mentioned 
the fact that in the Civil War time Washington's 
address was taken out of the books of the Southern 
States which were in use in the public schools. The 



58 Sermons for Great Days 

Southern States might not have seceded from the 
United States if the people had read Washington's 
address. While General Lee had nothing to do 
with it personally, he told me freely that the farewell 
address was constantly coming up in a Virginian's 
mind — although they would not allow it to be taught 
in the schools, that farewell advice was so applicable 
to that day of secession. In order to emphasize what 
Washington said which applied to that time, let me 
for a moment call your attention to his exhortation. 
Perhaps I speak too much upon the Civil War. An 
old man lives in his younger days, and consequently 
I perhaps think more of those things than it may 
be reasonable to do. But I know you will overlook 
my weakness if I do recall the things of my youth 
with greater clearness than the things of the past 
year. 

But, now, listen, Americans, what the Father of 
your country wrote, I believe by the direction of a 
divine voice from heaven. Let us see what he ad- 
vised which ought to have prevented the Civil War 
altogether. It was Washington's Farewell Address 
to the people of the United States. He said: 

^'Interwoven as is the love of liberty with every 
ligament of your hearts, no recommendation of mine 
is necessary to fortify or confirm the attachment. 

'The unity of government which constitutes you 
one people is also now dear to you. It is justly so, 



George Washington Day 59 

for it is a main pillar in the edifice of your real in- 
dependence, the support of your tranquilHty at home, 
your peace abroad; of your safety, of your pros- 
perity; of that very Hberty which you so highly 
prize. But as it is easy to foresee that, from dif- 
ferent causes and from different quarters, much 
pains will be taken, many artifices employed, to 
weaken in your minds the conviction of the truth; 
as this is the point in your political fortress against 
which the batteries of internal and external enemies 
will be most constantly and actively (though often 
covertly and insidiously) directed, it is of infinite 
moment that you should properly estimate the im- 
mense value of your national union to your collective 
and individual happiness; that you should cherish 
a cordial, habitual, and immovable attachment to it ; 
accustoming yourselves to think and speak of it as 
of the palladium of your political safety and pros- 
perity; watching for its preservation with jealous 
anxiety; discountenancing whatever may suggest 
even a suspicion that it can in any event be aban- 
doned; and indignantly frowning upon the first 
dawning of every attempt to alienate any portion 
of our country from the rest, or to enfeeble the sac- 
red ties which now link together the various parts. 

"For this you have every inducement of sym- 
pathy and interest. Citizens, by birth or choice, of 
a common country, that country has a right to con- 



6o Sermons for Great Days 

centrate your affections. The name of American, 
which belongs to you in your national capacity, must 
always exalt the just pride of patriotism more than 
any appellation derived from local discriminations. 
With slight shades of difference, you have the same 
religion, manners, habits and political principles. 
You have in a common cause fought and triumphed 
together; the independence and liberty you possess 
are the work of joint counsels, and joint efforts of 
common dangers, sufferings and successes. 

^'But these considerations, however powerfully 
they address themselves to your sensibility, are 
greatly outweighed by those which apply more im- 
mediately to your interest. Here every portion of 
our country finds the most commanding motives for 
carefully guarding and preserving the union of the 
whole.'' 

Of course, the Southern States could not heed 
that address of George Washington, and they passed 
a motion to secede from the Union, which he had so 
strongly opposed with a wisdom that has come down 
through the years. If George Washington's ad- 
dress had been heeded by the Southern States, there 
would have been no Civil War, and Abraham Lin- 
coln's method of purchasing the slaves and thus 
peacefully settling the great question would have 
been adopted. We can all see that now, and I have 
read that simply to emphasize that which seems in- 



Geof^ge Washington Day 6 1 

tended for us now. It is in no partisan spirit that I 
read from that great document. 

I would not criticise any party, or the President, 
or the Government, except to give constructive sug- 
gestions to the American people as to what we believe 
should be done. We are not partisans and we do 
not believe in partisanship. We are a church; we 
are an assembly of Christian people, and we desire 
to look at every question with the utmost fairness, 
with a conservative mind, and judge fairly and care- 
fully after we have heard all sides of it, and then 
express ourselves as American citizens, with utmost 
freedom. I have often been criticised by the public 
press, especially in the West, because they said I 
criticised President Wilson. Of course, I was rep- 
resented in the papers as saying harsh things which 
I really did not say. I did criticise in this pulpit 
the representatives of the American people going 
over to Europe in great state and expense, and ac- 
cepting the invitations to the palaces of kings and 
queens, which is so inconsistent with American sim- 
plicity. We don't believe in kings. Indeed, we 
fought them for our independence, and we have held 
ourselves aloof from them, and we should hold our- 
selves aloof from them now with great care. We, 
as American people are democratic in habit and 
thought. George Washington and Abraham Lincoln 
would never have been found in such associations. 



62 Sermons for Great Days 

But this is only my personal opinion. Our appeal 
should be made to the people and not to kings and 
queens. Mr. Wilson's appeal for the United States 
could have been to the people, and not to kings and 
queens. Washington said that independent personal 
citizenship is the chief est ambition of the United 
States. When he speaks against party and against 
partisanship, as Washington does, with such strong 
emphasis, he stated that the day would come when 
each American citizen would think for himself, and 
vote for himself, and should not be swayed by any 
popular opinion or movement of party or parties, — 
to be an '*ideal republic," — and I believe we are 
reaching it. We are getting nearer to it. Washing- 
ton's Ideal was that every man (and I beheve every 
woman) should be an independent soul responsible 
directly to God, each obeying his own conscience to 
the best of his ability, and each having sufficient 
education to be able to think independently and then 
vote independently, and let it thus be a ''government 
of the people, by the people and for the people,'' and 
not an imperial rule of one man or one set of men. 
Now, I want to read of the things that apply to 
us and that would seem to be so applicable to our 
present condition. Open your hearts to it. I try to 
open mine, try to forget all partisanship, all preju- 
dice, and just read it as though it were *^a voice 
from heaven." If George Washington were to 



George Washington Day 63 

come back to earth to-day, he could not say any- 
thing more appropriate, and probably would not 
state anything different from what is contained in 
this farewell message. He says : 

"It is important, likewise, that the habits of think- 
ing in a free country should inspire caution in those 
intrusted with its administration, to confine them- 
selves within their respective constitutional shores, 
avoiding in the exercise of the powers of one de- 
partment to encroach upon another." 

That has been the great evil in the past few years. 

'^The spirit of encroachment tends to consolidate 
the powers of all departments in one, and you create, 
whatever the form of government, a real despotism.'' 

Could man speak in stronger language if he were 
to speak to-day? 

*^A just estimate of that love of power, and prone- 
ness to abuse it, which predominates in the human 
heart, is sufficient to satisfy us of the truth of this 
position. The necessity of reciprocal checks in the 
exercise of political power, by dividing and distrib- 
uting it into different depositories, and constituting 
each the guardian of the public weal against inva- 
sions by others, has been evinced by experiments 
ancient and modern; some of them in our country 
and under our own eyes. To preserve them must 
be as necessary as to institute them. If, in the 
opinion of the people, the distribution or the modifi- 



64 Sermons for Great Days 

cation of the constitutional powers may be in any- 
particular wrong, let it be corrected by an amend- 
ment in the way which the Constitution designates. 
But let there be no change by usurpation ; for though 
this, in one instance, may be the instrument of good, 
it is the customary weapon by which free govern- 
ments are destroyed. The precedent must always 
greatly overbalance in permanent evil any partial or 
transient benefit which the use can at any time yield. 
"Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to 
political prosperity, religion and morality are indis- 
pensable supports. In vain would that man claim 
the tribute of patriotism, who should labor to sub- 
vert those great pillars of human happiness, those 
firmest props of the duties of men and citizens. The 
mere politician, equally with the pious man, ought to 
respect and cherish them. A volume could not trace 
all their connections with public and private felicity. 
Let it simply be asked: Where is the security for 
property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of 
religious obligation deserts the oaths which are the 
instruments of investigation in courts of justice? 
And let us with caution indulge the supposition that 
morality can be maintained without religion. What- 
ever may be conceded to the influence of refined edu- 
cation on minds of peculiar structure, reason and 
experience both forbid us to expect that national 



George Washington Day 65 

morality can prevail in exclusion of religious prin- 
ciple. 

''Observe good faith and justice toward all na- 
tions ; CULTIVATE PEACE AND HARMONY WITH THEIif 
ALL." 

I wish that sentence could be written on the 
walls of Congress to be read every day! 

''Observe good faith and justice to all nations, 
cultivate peace and harmony with them all . . .'' 
not only with France, and England, and Italy, — ^but 
with them all, — toward all other nations! 

"Religion and morahty enjoin this conduct; and 
can it be that good policy does not equally enjoin itl 
It will be worthy of a free, enlightened, and, at no 
distant period, a great nation, to give to mankind 
the magnanimous and too novel example of a people, 
always guided by an exalted justice and benevo- 
lence/' 

What wonderful language that is, and how it 
grows upon me as I read it! 

"Who can doubt that, in the course of time and 
things, the fruits of such a plan would richly repay 
any temporary advantages which might be lost by a 
steady adherence to it. Can it be that Providence 
has not connected the permanent felicity of the na- 
tion with its virtue. The experiment, at least, is 
recommended by every sentiment which ennobles 



66 Sermons for Great Days 

human nature. Alas! is it rendered impossible by 
its vices? 

"in the execution of such a plan, nothing 

IS MORE essential THAN THAT PERMANENT, IN- 
VETERATE ANTIPATHIES AGAINST PARTICULAR NA- 
TIONS, AND PASSIONATE ATTACHMENTS FOR OTHERS, 
SHOULD BE excluded/' 

If Washington were living to-day, he would call 
the attention of the American people to the fact 
that the very foundations of the Commonwealth of 
our state, as well as that of many other states, have 
been laid by noble men and women who left the per- 
secutions of Germany to come to live in this country. 
We must not let our prejudices against Germany go 
so far as to entertain a prejudice against every per- 
son in America with a German name. We must not 
do that if we love God and reverence Washington. 
Because the Germans of our state are a most mag- 
nificent people, and have done great things for it, and 
in the days of the Revolution, when they came from 
Germany, they were ''the Pilgrim Fathers," and they 
took flight from Gennany because they disliked its 
government ; they disliked its tyranny, and they came 
here to be free, and they are among the noblest of 
the races here. I am sure if Washington were here 
to-day, he would say to us, as he said in his fare- 
well address, — 



George Washington Day 67 

"just and amicable feelings toward all should be 
cultivated — .'* 

Not an alliance with France ; not an alliance with 
England is going to save the world, but honor and 
justice toward all nations was his idea, and God 
grant that it may continue to be so. 

''A passionate attachment of one nation for an- 
other produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the 
favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imagi- 
nary common interest where no real common inter- 
est exists, an infusing into one the enmities of the 
other, betrays the former into a participation in the 
quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate 
inducement or justification. It leads, also, to con- 
cessions to the favorite nation of privileges denied 
to others which is apt doubly to injure the nation 
making the concessions ; by necessarily parting with 
what ought to have been retained, and by exciting 
jealousy, ill-will, and a disposition to retaliate in the 
parties from whom equal privileges are with- 
held. . • . 

"against the insidious wiles of foreign in- 
fluence (l CONJURE YOU TO BELIEVE ME MY FEL- 
LOW-CITIZENS ) THE JEALOUSY OF A FREE PEOPLE 
OUGHT TO BE CONSTANTLY AWAKE, SINCE HISTORY^ 
AND EXPERIENCE PROVE THAT FOREIGN INFLUENCE 
IS ONE OF THE MOST BANEFUL FOES OF REPUBLICAN 

GOVERNMENT. But that jcalousy, to be useful, must 



68 Sermons for Great Days 

be impartial, else it becomes the instrument of the 
very influence to be avoided, instead of a defense 
against it. Excessive partiality for one foreign 
nation, and excessive dislike of another cause those 
whom they actuate to see danger only on one side, 
and serve to veil and even second the arts of in- 
fluence on the other. ... 

'The great rule of conduct for us in regard to 
foreign nations is in extending our commercial rela- 
tions, to have with them as little political connection 
as possible. So far as we have already formed en- 
gagements, let them be fulfilled with perfect good 
faith. Here let us stop. 

"EUROPE HAS A SET OF PRIMARY INTERESTS 
WHICH TO US HAVE NONE^ OR A VERY REMOTE RE- 
LATION. Hence, she must be engaged in frequent 
Controversies, the causes of which are essentially 
foreign to our concerns. Hence, therefore, it must 
be unwise in us to implicate ourselves in the ordinary 
vicissitudes of her policies, or the ordinary combina- 
tions of her friendships or enmities. 

"Our detached and distant situation invites and 
enables us to pursue a different course. If we re- 
main one people under an efficient government, the 

PERIOD IS NOT FAR OFF WHEN WE MAY DEFY MATE- 
RIAL INJURY FROM EXTERNAL ANNOYANCE : WHEN 
WE MAY TAKE SUCH AN ATTITUDE AS WILL CAUSE 
THE NEUTRALITY WE MAY AT ANY TIME RESOLVE 



George Washington Day 69 

UPON TO BE SCRUPULOUSLY RESPECTED; WHEN 
BELLIGERENT NATIONS^ UNDER THE IMPOSSIBILITY 
OF MAKING ACQUISITIONS UPON US^ WILL NOT 
LIGHTLY HAZARD THE GIVING US PROVOCATION; 
WHEN WE MAY CHOOSE PEACE OR WAR^ aS OUR 
INTEREST^ GUIDED BY JUSTICE, SHALL COUNSEL/'' 

It would, perhaps, be interesting for me to read 
further in this wonderful farewell address of George 
Washington, for I could not by any reading of mine, 
or by any sermon that I might deliver, do anything 
like the good that I do by simply recalling to you, 
the American people, the sayings of the Father of 
Our Country. Whoever reads his farewell address, 
and reads it carefully, will see that it was a voice 
from heaven speaking as a prophet. He looked down 
through the years and could see precisely what is 
occurring now, — as Isaiah saw hundreds of years 
before what would occur when Christ came on 
earth. The words of George Washington came 
ringing through the years, no matter to what party 
we belong. Let us respect the Father of Our Coun- 
try, and let us study his words with care, and let 
us live the Christian life, which George Washington 
urged upon all the people. 

What a great thing it is for the American people 
to have a heritage like that of Washington. If this 
farewell address of George Washington's were now 
put into the hands of every scholar in every school 



70 Sermons for Great Days 

of the United States, the nation would be safe. 
We would be saved from many mistakes; saved 
from complications which are so dangerous. 

Let us earnestly pray that George Washington's 
view that all nations should be equally respected and 
honored, and each one independent in its own place, 
and yet with one common council, may come. The 
Lord grant that it may come now, |nd that no mis- 
takes may now be made, so that out of this shall 
finally come a league of all the nations, and all the 
nations have a common, central parliament to decide 
all differences. That seems to be the only way to 
permanent peace. It was the pathway pointed out 
by the Father of His Country; it is the pathway 
pointed out by the Lord Jesus. 

BENEDICTION 

O Lord! Help every American citizen to be 
courageous enough, fair enough, strong enough, to 
look George Washington's picture in the eye and 
read what he said and meditate carefully upon it. 
Let Thy benediction come upon this country, and 
for George Washington's sake, may it pursue its 
course onward and upward to greater prosperity, in 
all things that will make for that noble example, 
for justice, honesty, and peace at home, which will 
have its influence over the nations of the earth, 
greater than armies and navies. We ask Thy bene- 
diction in Christ's Name. Amen. 



V 

Palm Sunday s Sacrifice 

(JOHN XII :i3) 

T T OW important and beautiful was the thought 
X X of the early fathers of the church when they 
divided the year into religious seasons and when they 
provided that Christian minds should be turned at 
Easter time toward the burial and resurrection of 
Christ! It was a helpful thought, perhaps given 
of God, which led them to observe the Christmas 
season, the Easter Sunday, and this Palm Sunday 
represented by to-day. The Christian world has 
fallen into mannerisms and ritualistic formalism, 
so that the too close observance of these days and 
seasons has created a spirit of neglect and a lack of 
appreciation of the great truths that underhe them. 
If we could only strike a middle, safe ground, not 
the extremes of formalism nor the extremes of neg- 
lect, we should probably get the greatest benefit that 
can be derived from these seasons of the year. 
Now, we will strive in a measure to reach that point. 
To-day being Palm Sunday, it is well for us, with- 
out formality, to study what the day suggests and 

71 



72 Sermons for Great Days 

to bring back, if we can, some of the simple, plain 
history with which this day is sO' intimately con- 
nected. 

We do not understand the divine side of the 
Messiahship. I know that it has a much higher 
meaning, that it has a wider application, than our 
brains have approached. I know that in the 
atonement by the Son of God, reconciling God 
to man, and man to God, is a mystery greater 
than can be explained by any human mind. We 
do not expect to fathom it. He is only presumptuous 
who attempts to explain it. No man can so fully 
understand God. His thoughts are above our 
thoughts as the heavens are above the earth, and he 
is only insane, or a very foolish, or a very wicked 
man, who endeavors to place himself alongside of 
God and explain all that God knows. We cannot 
understand all the divine relations between Christ 
and God. But it was intended that we should un- 
derstand the human side that lies between us and 
Christ. And the narrative, told in the plainest and 
simplest language by the apostle, brings forward 
the chief thought in connection with this day, and 
shows us clearly how Christ sacrificed for us. This 
side of His life is not meditated upon enough. 
Christ made a great sacrifice for us from the human 
side in this, that he decided weeks before His 
crucifixion that He would deliberately go to martyr- 



Palm Sunday s Sacrifice 73 

dom for the good of mankind. When He came to 
that decision He was at Capernaum, at the north end 
of the Sea of GaHlee, His own home. Think for 
a moment, then, what this Palm Sunday ought to 
suggest. He started from Capernaum, set his face 
steadfastly towards Jerusalem in order, as He told 
His disciples, that He might be lifted up and draw 
all men to Him. The Palm Sunday which we to- 
day, in a sense, are celebrating, represents His tri- 
umphal entry into Jerusalem, which shows the cul- 
minating point of His sacrifice on the human side 
for us. The cross, of course, is ever in our minds; 
but this was the crowning point in His self-denial. 

Now, when He deliberately decided to die, He 
was in perfect health. It does not require much 
loss for a person racked with pain hour after 
hour, confined to the house, having lost all 
acquaintanceship with the world, and with all 
friends, to make up his mind to die. God seems to 
have adjusted His providence for the good of His 
people, and seems to have decided that He would 
gradually lessen the hold upon the world of those 
who love Him. So we find, in thousands of cases 
— indeed, in a great majority of cases — ^that God 
sends pain, illness, different forms of sorrow; and 
gradually accustoms His children to the thought 
that this world is more and more painful, less and 
less attractive. He keeps clipping off here and there 



74 Sermons for Great Days 

the hold which we have upon the world until at 
last in the perfection of a saintly life a man is 
ready to go. No attraction in this world for him. 
All is in the beyond. A man who has reached his 
three-score and ten is then living on borrowed time, 
and is looking towards the coming, towards the 
future. God is so kind. Now, if He were to take 
us all in the fullness of health, in the prime vigor 
of our completest manhood, and decree that we 
should die, it would be like the awful decree of death 
to a man who was going to the gallows. He knows 
he will die next Friday at 1 1 130 o'clock. He is in 
the possession of all his faculties, all his strength 
and health. This world is still so dear to him. Oh, 
what a fearful experience that is! But if a man 
chose thus to die because of his love for others 
and does it unhesitatingly, walks straight on to that 
moment of his death of which he has been fully 
informed, it is a great sacrifice from a human side. 
It is the highest form of human giving of himself 
for others. Now, Christ was thirty-three years of 
age. He was at that year in the history of man- 
hood's life when He was completest in all His fac- 
ulties, in all His possessions. We begin and live 
thirty-three years up to the highest possible achieve- 
ment in natural forces. Then from thirty-three we 
begin to run down, and thirty-three years from that 
time we have reached the boundary where old age 



Palm Sunday's Sacrifice 75 

isettles in, and a man is supposed to retire, or often to 
be useless. Now, He was right in the center, at the 
zenith of all His ambitions, of all His physical 
forces, of all His brain comprehension. He was 
at the highest point and yet decided to die, to leave 
all that this earth had of joy for Him, and face 
the cross, all for the world's sake. 

So then we see Him at Capernaum, starting forth 
for His last journey. That He knew it was His 
last is shown by His saying so distinctly to His 
disciples on several occasions on His journey to- 
wards Jerusalem. He explained to them decidedly 
that He must be crucified, and that He would arise 
the third day. 

Now, the second thought concerning this sacrifice 
is that He left His home that morning of His 
journey down the Jordan River, knowing that so 
far as human life was concerned, He was never 
to see it again. When He should see it again He 
would be only in His glorified body. Hence, human- 
ly speaking. He was bidding farewell, as you and I 
bid farewell, to His old home. Dear old Capernaum ! 
How He loved the shores of that beautiful blue 
sea; how happily He had heard all the years the 
ripple of its white waves up its shelly banks, and 
how many, times He had waded in on its shores as 
a boy, and how many times fished on it in calm and 
in storm, by night and by day! How many a boat 



76 Sermons for Great Days 

He had helped to build which had floated out with 
song upon the sea! Going from home for the last 
time! He turns the point at Magdala, as He is 
about to take His pathway into the mountains, and 
He turns back to look upon Capernaum for the last 
time in the flesh. Back on Capernaum! I know 
not why it is, but men who have been bom and 
lived in the mountains love their home so much 
more deeply and cling to its associations with so 
much greater tenacity than those who are born on 
the level of the prairies or the plains. They that 
have lived in the Himalayas of India are so tenacious 
of home that they sicken and die when confined to 
the plains, though in palaces they live. Those in 
the Alps you cannot persuade to leave those white 
peaks, those deep valleys, those rushing water falls. 
You cannot persuade them to leave the echoing of 
the hills because the heart, the soul, every fibre of 
being seems to be woven in with the rough cedars 
or more rough rock, with the cold snows of the 
mountain tops. In the mountains of Galilee, down 
in its valleys, or on the shore of the most lovely 
lake of all the world, dwelt this man for thirty-three 
years. We suppose that He left Nazareth when 
Joseph was dead, and with His widowed mother 
moved from Nazareth to Capernaum, and from 
thenceforth that was His home. He turns, I say 
at the vale of Arbela. He looked back at the village 



Palm Sunday s Sacrifice 77 

running up the hillside there, and it was just the 
time of year when it was the most beautiful sight 
on which the eye ever rested. I have been in 
Palestine three times at that season of the year, and 
the last time, three years ago, we rode our horses 
and mules through whole acres and acres of lilies, 
roses, daisies, buttercups and other blossoms. As 
far as you could see for miles, on mountain and 
hills and valley and plain, it was one great c-arpet 
of the most wonderful colors that God ever put into 
vegetation. As we rode down to the Sea of Galilee, 
our horses' bellies deep in all those beautiful colors 
God only can paint, covering miles and miles of 
territory, it was a sight one can never forget. Why, 
there is not a flower that grows in the tropical 
island of Cuba, but what is there. There is not a 
flower that grows in the frigid edges of the mer-de- 
glace of the Alps but what is there. There is not 
a tree or shrub from all the heights of the frigid 
down to the torrid, or from the heat to the cold, 
or the east to the west, but what can flourish there. 
The Sea of Galilee is 640 feet below the level of the 
Mediterranean Sea, and at its shores you have all 
the tropical vegetation. You can stand and look 
up, and within the sight of your eye is vegetation 
of the frigid zone. It is as cold as the tops of the 
Himalayas themselves. There is the white peak of 
Mount Hermon looking over that landscape, being 



78 Sermons for Great Days 

a bright lighthouse for all of Syria and Palestine. 
Its snows never disappear. Its great seas of ice are 
ever crumbling and crushing towards the plain. 

As I stood, one day in 1869, for the first time at 
Magdala, the home of Mary Magdalene, and looked 
across to Capernaum and up the slope of that moun- 
tain side, with all its verdure of multiplied beauties, 
I thought of Christ going away from that home 
with His face set towards Jerusalem. It was the 
most beautiful time of the year. It was when the 
Sea of Galilee is calm and blue and peaceful. It 
was when the mountains were at their best ; it was 
when the sky was clear ; it was when the atmosphere 
was cool at evening, and never over hot at noonday. 
It was when vegetation was starting, fields of grain 
rising on every hand, and beginning to bow their 
heads towards ripeness. In the brightest and most 
hopeful season He turned His face from His home, 
looking back on it for the last time. It is true that 
His mother was with Him; it is true that Mary 
Magdalene and others were with Him ; it is true that 
Peter and John and Nathaniel were there ; but they 
could not understand His feeling. He was bidding 
His home good-by for the last time in His human 
existence. That sacrifice was for us. 

Then, there is another thought, that He was leav- 
ing all the friends of His youth. When we get to 
be old, we make few new friends, a very few of 



Palfn Sunday s Sacrifice 79 

the sincere, dear ones are made when a man has 
passed his sixty-five years. He does not make new 
friends; he dings to the old, and when they drop 
away he has no support left. But here was Jesus, 
in the prime of life, when friendships are dearest, 
when they are altogether the sweetest. He was 
turning away from them. There was the beautiful 
marble synagogue, built by the centurion, in sight 
from any portion of the Sea of Galilee. There were 
the palaces on the right and left, and the wharves 
and fishing boats, and sails in front ; there the rising 
sea, with sheening vegetation at the rear. He looked 
back upon that home, filled with so many friend- 
ships, so many people He had loved. All His play- 
mates of His youth were there. ''Farewell, fare- 
well, Capernaum! Farewell, all My schoolmates! 
Farewell, all the old beloved worshipers in the syn- 
agogue! Farewell, all for whom I labored as a 
carpenter ! Farewell, all who have done Me a kind- 
ness ! Farewell, all to whom I have tried to be kind \ 
Farewell, a final farewell, all who loved Me on 
earth!'' 

Was not that a sacrifice that should touch the 
heart of any of us? 

Then, looking ahead at His journey. He must 
needs go through Samaria. Then He crosses the 
Jordan River, is again in Herod's possessions, go- 
ing down toward the Dead Sea and Jerusalem. 



8o Sermons for Great Days 

Now, we find Him sending the seventy ahead of 
Him into whatsoever city He intended to go, show- 
ing that He had marked out His exact path. He 
had told them to go to a certain village near Samaria, 
then to go to another near Jordan, and another in 
Perea, and another further down, where John had 
been baptizing; and another still farther on, and to 
go ahead of Him to Jericho, go ahead of Him to 
Bethphage, go ahead of Him to Bethany, go ahead 
of Him to Jerusalem, and announce that He was 
coming. There was the most awful sacrifice on the 
human side of His living. He was going to His 
death. He knew it would be the death of a criminal 
— hanged on the cross between thieves, and ac- 
counted to be a rebel, murderer, a leader of people 
to rebellion against Rome. He knew all that. He 
took all the disgrace of the risk of the publicity in 
order that in the few days that were left Him He 
might arrange for the best concerning God's king- 
dom. 

Oh, suppose you knew that you had only three 
or four days to live; suppose one knew they had 
only three or four years. Suppose you knew that on 
a certain day, three or four years from now, you 
would depart hence; you would set your house in 
order ; you would begin to make your arrangements 
for your family, for yourself, for your soul. You 
would look around and say, ''What can I do in the 



Palm Sunday s Sacrifice 8 1 

time that is left me now?'' Jesus had only these 
few days left to Him, and He was going to make 
the most possible use of it for the good of other 
people. Wholly forgetful of Himself, thinking only 
of others. He wondered how much good He could 
do on His way. If you will read the story of His 
journey of these few days preceding that Palm Sun- 
day, you will find in it some of the most blessed 
teachings in the whole book. Calling little children to 
Him and putting His hands on them, and praying 
for them ; calling His disciples and instructing them 
what to do after He had gone; calling together a 
multitude and warning them to be prepared for the 
coming of God; giving those wonderful parables 
which have been continuously teaching ever since 
that day. So He was using these days before His 
crucifixion to the best possible advantage. That wasi 
such a sacrifice for us. I have sometimes thought if 
I knew the exact date on which I were to die, I 
would like to retire, to get away from the world, to 
get into myself again. I would only look out for 
my own soul, forgetting that he is only serving God 
best and preparing himself best for heaven who is 
careful for some one else. The man who is spending 
his time on his own soul is mean and contemptible 
in the sight of God and the sight of men. If a man 
had only three or four days to spare before he died, 
instead of preparing only himself for heaven, he 



82 Sermons for Great Days 

should be preparing some one else for heaven. Then 
he need not trouble himself about getting to heaven. 
He who helps men into salvation is the one who is 
the nearest to God, after all. In one sense, we do 
need to look after our own souls and examine our- 
selves; yet, if we had only three or four days left, 
he is surest of heaven who spends his entire time in 
prayer, not for himself, but for others. Jesus put 
Himself in that position of putting His whole time 
in prayer for others. 

Then, there is one sweet thing in His history. 
I have touched upon it sometimes with all my soul 
and often have been misunderstood. Why can't we 
study these things in the light of His human life? 
Jesus passed down the Jordan River — Perea on the 
east side of the Jordan — until He came to the ford 
of the Jordan where He had been baptized, and 
there He crossed over into Jericho, and there He 
cured the blind man, and there He looked around 
among the palaces in which the great had lived, and 
looked out upon Cleopatra's beautiful garden. He 
looked out to the cultivated fields of grain; he looked 
down on the blue Dead Sea, up to the majestic 
mountains towards Jerusalem, and He was on a 
journey, the last journey from all these palaces, from 
all that makes human greatness, towards the little 
sweet home in the mountains at Bethany. He had 
been there before and had restored Lazarus to life. 



Palm Sunday s Sacrifice 83 

He had been there often before. It was the home 
of Mary. It was a home in which He found espe- 
cial enjoyment, and that human side of Christ's char- 
acter needs to be emphasized tO' understand the great 
sacrifice He made for us. Thirty-three years old, 
around Him every attraction, He enters into this 
home; and there are Mary and Martha, whom He 
loved, and who loved Him. Young man, if before 
the day set for your marriage, you are called to 
turn your back on all this joy and peace and face 
towards the world as a duty and leave the ideal home 
and the wife and the love of womanhood, and for 
duty's sake* to face a certain death, then could you 
imagine something of the sacrifice of Christ at that 
time on His way to His death. He knew He was 
to die the next Friday, and yet goes cheerfully into 
this home, where He had received so much of the 
purest, holiest love, and where He had been cared 
for with such especial attention. Tell me that Christ 
never loved as men loved, and then I must say He 
was never tempted as men are tempted, and never 
could sacrifice as men must sacrifice. He was 
without evil, but He loved Mary Magdalene. I do 
not mean in a worldly sense. One cannot deeply 
appreciate the holy sacrifice of Christ unless a 
glance is taken into that domestic home. They 
had set out a dinner for Him. Oh, the unconscious- 
ness of it all ! Think of your going into the home 



84 Sermons for Great Days 

with a young woman who loves you with all 
the intensity of her pure nature, and who might 
cherish a deep hope some day to be the mistress 
of your home; think of her welcome while you 
know that in five days she will be left alone to a 
cold and heartless world. Think of that domestic 
scene and the awful sacrifice. I do not mean to say. 
that He was engaged to Mary. I do not put any 
such extreme inference as that. I mean to say that 
He loved Mary and Mary loved Him in the divinest 
and noblest spirit. Martha loved Him, and Lazarus 
loved Him, and Simon loved Him ; but Mary Mag- 
dalene called Him "Rabboni." She was the only 
one who appears to have addressed Him thus in his 
family. We need not discuss here the different views 
taken concerning the identity of Mary of Bethany 
and Mary Magdalene. Think of their parting, and 
He silent about death ! Think of her going gleefully 
to the door and bidding Him good-by and saying, 
"We will meet again,'' and His reply, ''When I have 
ascended to my Father." When He had risen from 
the dead the affectionate woman caught Him by the 
feet, and called Him her Master, and He said, 
'Touch me not. I have not yet ascended to my 
Father." He must have told her before that in 
heaven all things would be complete and true love 
would have its fullest fruition and satisfaction there. 
Now they part, He with His face toward Jerusalem 



Palm Sunday s Sacrifice 85 

and Mary turning back into the house, with a sense 
of intuitive gloom that comes to woman's heart, 
which men seldom know. A premonition of things 
to come which God does not give to men. Was not 
that a part of His great sacrifice for us? 

As He went out that Palm Sunday morning from 
that home, He started up the Mount of Olives. You 
know that Bethany is over on the east side of the 
Mount of Olives. Jerusalem is on the west side, 
across a deep valley. From Bethany we look down 
upon Jericho, and the Dead Sea and away to the 
mountains of Moab. You cannot see Jerusalem from 
Bethany, although it is only two miles away. Now 
Jesus starts out from this little village, from the 
home of Simon, and enters on His journey into 
Jerusalem for the last time as a free man. He says 
to His disciples, ''Go up there and you will find the 
foal of an ass there, and bring the animal to me." 
They bring it to Him; He mounts upon it, and, 
coming around the spur of the mountain, suddenly 
the whole panorama of Jerusalem presents itself to 
His view. I shall not forget the first time I looked 
upon it ; it filled my soul with such astonishment and 
such a sense of sublimity that the tears just fell on 
my face. I could not keep them back. On that day 
Jesus came, and, as He was riding along, it seems 
that He came to this spur of the mountain, followed 
by His disciples. Men, women and many pilgrims, 



86 Sermons for Great Days 

who at that season had been coming up to Jerusalem 
and who had pitched their tents and booths all over 
the mountain, received Him with wild acclaim. But 
He wept over the city. ''O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, 
thou that killest the prophets and stonest them which 
are sent unto thee; how often would I have gathered 
thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her 
chickens under her wings, and ye would not! Be- 
hold, your house is left unto you desolate." There 
was the Calvary Mount, the place of the skull, in 
plain sight beyond the walls. There, on the next 
Friday, He was to be lifted and die an awful death. 
He knew it ; He saw it. But He saw Jerusalem and 
felt her awful responsibility. He descends the 
Mount of Olives toward the valley of the Kedron. 
The people recognize Him as the prophet of Galilee. 
When they saw Him riding down this mountain, 
coming and going to Jerusalem at that season of the 
year, that Paschal season of the year, when the 
Jews celebrated it with gatherings from the utter- 
most parts of the earth at Jerusalem, they recognized 
Him, the prophet of Galilee, and their desire for a 
king was so great that they were willing to accept 
any person if he would set himself up against the 
Romans. Here was a man of irreproachable char- 
acter. He loved mankind, had miraculous power; 
He was especially favored of God, and the multitude 
cried out, "Here is our King; here is our King. 



Palm Sunday s Sacrifice 87 

Jerusalem shall be the capital of a great nation again. 
The Romans shall be driven out and the old wor- 
ship shall be restored in the temple, and the Jews 
shall reign once more. Here is our Kin^; let us 
place Him on the throne to-day !" With that thought 
in their minds, the people begin to cry out ''Hosanna, 
Hosanna to the King, that cometh in the name of 
the Lord, the King given of God. Hosanna in the 
highest to our King !'' Ah, a throne so close to Him. 
The people were united on Him; all classes ready 
to accept the King if they could only get one to 
lead them against the oppressive, taxing Romans. 
He could be a king — a throne so near, a sceptre at 
hand, power within His reach, and yet riding, weep- 
ing on, knowing that in four days He should lie in 
the tomb as a disgraced criminal! A throne right 
here for the taking, yet deliberately choosing the 
way of the humble and the servant and the name 
of a criminal, through trial in the court, even to 
the crucifixion at the place of the skull. 

How great was the sacrifice of Christ on that 
Palm Sunday ! He could have had His home again ; 
He could have had extended possessions; He could 
have held all His friends. He could have had a long 
life of love; He could have had His peaceful home 
in Bethany; He could have had human love of the 
highest and the best; He could have had a throne. 
Yet, on that Palm Sunday, when all the world ac- 



88 Sermons for Great Days 

claimed, He was weeping on toward the cross, be- 
cause, looking down the ages. He saw that it was 
better for His Father's kingdom and necessary for 
the salvation of our souls that He should choose 
the way of the humble and the path of the malefactor 
unto a death of pain. 

Throw your minds forward through this week 
into the events which followed that day, to the 
crucifixion and to the resurrection, which we shall 
especially celebrate next Sunday 1 



Easter 

(luke XXIV 132 )! 

THIS afternoon in the wonderful address of 
Professor Cobern I was reminded of the walk 
of the disciples to Emmaus, after the burial of 
Jesus Christ. When He had revealed Himself to 
them, they said one to another : 

"Did not our hearts burn within us while He talked 
with us by the way, and while He opened to us the 
Scriptures?'' 

I heard a gentleman, as he went out of the church 
last week, say to another : "What are you going to 
do for Easter?" 

When I heard each ask the other that question I 
began to ask myself the question: "What is the 
proper observance of Easter? What is the best 
and wisest thing for any man to do with an occasion 
like that ?'' Then I thought of what the disciples did 
for Easter, and the great lesson returned to me. 

Among the disciples of Jesus were Simon and 
Cleopas, intimate friends, perhaps dwelling in the 
same house, perhaps partners together in business. 

89 



90 Sermons for Great Days 

The scene opens with their leaving Jerusalem after 
the sorrowful crucifixion, after the burial of the 
body, and returning to their native village. 

If there is anything that is sad, if there is any- 
thing that tries the pride of a man, it is to go to his 
native place after failure, to go among his old neigh- 
bors who never thought he would amount to much, 
to go among his own playmates who thought he was 
foolishly aristocratic and too ambitious when he 
went away and left them to make a venture upon 
something in the city. Then to go back after all 
their insinuations, and after all their jealousies, to 
confess that life Is a failure! Such was the case 
with Simon and Cleopas. It is a sad experience even 
at the best to confess one's failure, even to one's 
friends. 

I remember on the second day of the great fire 
in Boston seeing two young business men as they 
met at the comer where their store had stood. I 
was standing not far from them when they met. 
One had been away traveling as a salesman, and 
had gotten home after he had heard of the fire. It 
continued through two days and a half. He had 
hoped their store would be saved. They met there 
at the corner. The smoke still covered the heavens, 
though the fire was under control, after having 
burned some twenty acres of the best of Boston. 
As they met their lips trembled, and the younger 



Easter 91 

man took hold of the shoulder of the elder man, his 
partner, and said: "Bill, is it all gone?'' Bill said: 
"Yes ; it is all gone. You see here all there is left. 
The insurance, of course, will be lost for the com- 
panies must fail, and so it is all gone." The younger 
man said : ""How can I go back home and tell them 
it is all gone ?" 

They walked away, and I wondered how they 
could go home. I afterwards learned from inquiries 
of a neighbor living in their suburban town that 
they did go home, and that they told their families 
that all had been lost. It was one of those bitter 
experiences in life that are rare, but so acute that 
they burn their way into the heart of a man. 

The condition of those two business men was 
very similar in its psychological phase to the condi- 
tion of Cleopas and Simon when they were going 
back home after the crucifixion of Christ. There 
is no doubt but what when they first told their vil- 
lage people that they were determined to go out 
and follow that new Rabbi from Nazareth, and be- 
come teachers, and take up the profession of teach- 
ing His gospel to the world, their neighbors all 
laughed at them, and their family thought it was a 
foolish thing to do. Now they must come home 
utterly broken and confess that it is all lost, that He 
was not the Rabbi they expected, that He was not 
the King they hoped to find, that all their time had 



92 Sermons for Great Days 

been wasted, and there was no more gospel to be 
preached. 

They had lost Jesus. When a man loses Him 
after once having had a glimpse of Him, how terri- 
ble is the after experience of life. Paul and Peter 
put it so strongly that after once men have tasted 
of Jesus, once they have known the way of life; 
that is, after they have had a near view of it, if 
then they fall away they become like the swine that 
returns to the mire. Then they go far down. The 
wonder is that Cleopas and Simon did not have such 
a revolting sense of rebelHon against God, against 
man, and everything that was good, as to have swept 
into the extreme of bitterness, and perhaps, of 
crime. 

Poor men who lose Jesus, that lose their confidence 
in Christianity, that lose their hope in God. I know 
of no more barren soul than the man who has been 
a member of the church, nominally so — half-hearted 
— ^who did not get wholly into Christ; who did not 
surrender his whole life to his Saviour, and con- 
sequently stood on the edge all the time, not com- 
pletely over into the spiritual kingdom of the church 
of Christ ; who found some fault with his neighbor, 
or discovered something that was wrong or dis- 
honest in some other member of the church, and 
standing in that critical relation it was his disposition, 
of course, to criticise everything that everyone else 



Easter 93 

did. When he has finally become convinced that 
his own experience is not deep enough to warrant 
him to believe that there is much to religion, then 
he sees and criticises what all other people are doing 
who belong to the church. He finally makes up his 
mind to abandon it, and there is not a worse wreck 
comes upon the shores, not a more terrible derelict 
floating in the seas to-night than that abandoned 
soul that has given itself to reckless drifting to its 
own fate. Oh, to be over in the kingdom, fully 
landed in Christ, that there may be no possible re- 
turn. 

Simon and Cleopas seem to have been in the mid- 
dle ground; that they believed in Christ in a sense, 
not with all their heart and with all their soul, but 
thought Him to be a great rabbi, a great teacher, a 
wise man who would make an excellent king for 
Jerusalem. But now He was in the tomb. He had 
been slain as a malefactor, and the disgrace of his 
death was upon them all, and they would rather 
die than live. 

Oh, to come home without Jesus ! Probably every 
one of us have returned sometime from a funeral, 
and re-entered the darkened home, and felt, "He is 
gone for all time." How strange it all is! How, 
without Christ, without a positive hope in the future, 
without a certain belief that in eternity awaits a 
reunion, there is an awful gloom in the soul as it 



94 Sermons for Great Days 

struggles and struggles to overcome the depression 
of the horrors of that time of returning from the 
grave. 

They were returning home from the grave. They 
had lost faith in Christ, and, of course, they had 
lost faith in God, and in the goodness of man, and 
Jesus was sorry for them. What a precious com- 
fort there is in the thought that after His resur- 
rection, when He was evidently in His resurrection 
body, retaining only sufficient appearance of the 
earthly body to convince His disciples that He was 
the same person, in that body which came through 
the doors without opening them, that was trans- 
ferred instantly like angels from one point to an- 
other, then He appeared unto His disciples as an 
angel of God might appear to you or to me. 

Jesus was sorry for them, and when they were 
walking on their way home, dreading to meet their 
friends, and thinking of the disgrace throughout 
life of the fiasco in which they had had a part. He 
drew nigh to them. Notice that He does not reveal 
Himself, as He talks to them, and they have some- 
how a feeling in their hearts that they did not expect, 
a comfort they could not have believed possible, an 
interpretation of the Scriptures on which they had 
never looked before. 

I thought when Professor Cobern was speaking 
this afternoon with reference to the archaeology 



Easter 95 

of the New Testament, of a little incident that oc- 
curred when I was in Jerusalem years ago. There 
was a dear, good old monk who attached himself to 
me when I was a correspondent of a London paper, 
and he cared for me with a fideHty, grace, and father- 
ly spirit that was one of the most lovable things 
in human experience. He went with me almost 
everywhere; he was full of every kind of informa- 
tion concerning the history of the land. Often we 
sat in Gethsemane's garden when the moon came 
up, and he described the scenes in Gethsemane when 
Christ suffered there, and when Jesus went to the 
disciples and found them sleeping. This good old 
monk one morning said to me: "How would you 
like to walk to Emmaus?" I said: ''I do not know 
where it is." He replied : "It is pretty well estab- 
lished now where it is. It is only a walk of about 
eight or nine miles. You are young and strong, and 
I am used to it. Now let us walk to Emmaus.'' So 
in the morning, right after breakfast, the old monk 
came, bringing an extra staff with him. We trudged 
off together towards Emmaus. We went down into 
the somewhat depressed, flat country for a mile or 
two from the wall of Jerusalem, then we clambered 
up the hill, quite steep, and when we had come to 
the top he turned back, and said: "You can now 
see Calvary and Golgotha," and the crosses must 
have been in plain sight when those two disciples 



96 Sermons for Great Days 

were going back home. If they turned around and 
looked, they could have seen the crosses probably 
remaining there after the bodies had been taken 
down. He said : ''You can see the wall of Jerusalem 
here for about seven miles." We turned every little 
while to catch a glimpse of a tower of Jerusalem, 
or of the Mount of Olives beyond. Throughout 
the whole journey the old monk was full of reason- 
able tradition. He said: *'Now here is the spot 
where Jesus is said to have joined them, apparently 
coming up the valley where another path entered 
this." 

The old monk stopped me and said: ''Do you 
know what the Greek word for 'burn' means in its 
most classical use, as, Their hearts did burn within 
them?' " I said I did not recall what the Greek word 
was. He said it was a compound word meaning "a 
fireplace, a home fire, or a fire in the home." He 
wrote upon a card afterwards what he thought was 
the proper translation of it, and I went to my Greek 
lexicon and I found that it is used in that way. In 
the classics they used the word here translated as 
"burn"; it meant a "fireplace feeling," a burning of 
the heart. The good old monk opened up the Scrip- 
tures to me as he said: "The feeling of peace in 
the hearts of Simon and Cleopas was like unto the 
feelings of those who sit around their home fire in^ 
the midst of their family circle." 



Easter 97 

What a definition that was of the coming of 
Christ — a hearthstone feeHng. Now then read it: 
^They said one to another, did not we have a 'fire- 
place feeling' within our hearts while He talked with 
us by the way?" Going home to the loved ones, 
going to the fire where they had sat in youth, where 
the children had been brought up, where they sat 
evenings to read, where they cooked their food, and 
where they brought out their dishes for their meals. 
The ''home feeling" of one who, after a day of toil 
goes home, where the world is shut out, and only his 
wife and children are there! He sits down by the 
fire to read some good book, or to tell some tale 
to his children, and there in the soft glow of that 
evening light he feels within his heart that restful, 
domestic peace, which could only represent the peace 
of God which passeth all understanding. 

It was a wonderful experience to me to go to 
Emmaus, to find the place where the old monk said 
their houses stood, and the gateway where the gate 
was swinging where Jesus stopped and ^'made as 
though He would go further." 

When I came back to Jerusalem I recalled an ex- 
perience of not many years before, that which made 
this illustration so impressive. It is personal, but 
I cannot think of a better illustration. In Somer- 
ville, Mass., I was nominated by the regular party 
for membership in the legislature. I was just be- 



98 Sermons for Great Days 

ginning the practice of law, and was ambitious as 
other young men are ambitious for distinction, for 
honor, for fame, and for office. Being nominated 
by the regular party which had always had a very 
large majority within the memory of men, I felt 
sure of my election. I went to my old father and 
mother, and told them I was nominated and was 
going to be elected to the legislature. No doubt 
about it at all. 

But a committee came to my house one night, 
which undoubtedly represented an opponent, and 
asked me how I stood *'on the temperance question." 
I told them I was out and out for the abolition of 
the saloon. They said: ''Well, that will defeat 
you. You would better change your principles, or 
say nothing about it, or else the other man will get 
in.'' I answered, ''I cannot possibly do that. I be- 
lieve the saloon is a curse. If I must say something 
about that, all that you can say from me is that I 
am against every saloon in the city, and wish they 
were utterly abolished, and that I should use my in- 
fluence in the legislature to that end if a law came 
up for that purpose." It cost me so muoh to say 
that. It was a fierce struggle. 

I went to the polls, and remained at a house 
that was near by all day. Men came and voted, and 
I saw my friends coming and going. When the 
time came to close the polls and count the ballots 



Easter 99 

I was invited to wait in the office of the town 
hall for the declaration of the vote. When the vote 
was counted I found I was defeated by twenty-three 
votes. I was defeated. Broken so that I felt my 
sorrow was in darkness, and I went out weeping in 
spite of my attempts at self-control. 

I walked down the dark street alone, for as soon 
as it was known I had been defeated every friend 
left me. That is the experience of every politician. 
There was no one to go home with me after I had 
been defeated. Before that they had made many 
a kind speech, gave all sorts of dinners, and voiced 
all kinds of praise in the press and other places. 
But just as soon as I was defeated not one followed 
me when I walked down the long street to the 
corner, and then down the hillside to my humble 
wooden house. 

I sat down by the little grate fire. My wife was 
in the kitchen, as she did the housework then, and 
she came out with my little baby in her arm. She 
expected, of course, that I was coming in triumph, 
and thought I had been elected, but when she heard 
me weeping and saw that I would not take any notice 
of the child, she knew that I was defeated. She 
knelt down beside my chair to throw her arms around 
my neck, and cried on my shoulder, and pushed our 
little baby into my lap. My tears fell on his face 
until he cried, and I had to get up and lay him in 



100 Sermons for Great Days 

his crib. I went back to my seat, oh, so broken and 
defeated, and my wife, with her arms again around 
me, said : ''Russell, it may be the best thing in the 
world. Think how you have not been home through 
all this campaign. Last week you were not home 
until after ii o'clock a single night, and you were 
called out even on Sunday. I have scarcely seen 
you since you were nominated. I think, anyhow, 
we will be happier here in our little home if you 
are not elected. Let the other man take the responsi- 
bility. It may be a good thing that you were de- 
feated." Well, while I did not believe it, while I 
hated the advice, yet with those arms around my 
neck, the firelight burning, and the little child sleep- 
ing in the crib over there, I could not help but feel 
what the old monk had said : ^'The home-fire feel- 
ing,'' the peace of soul which comes in the presence 
of the domestic fire. 

If a man can go home on Easter day with a clear 
conscience, having nothing of which to be ashamed, 
no matter how he has been defeated, and if there he 
finds some loving heart to give him a tender recep- 
tion, and to cheerfully hold up his spirits through his 
defeat, he is after all a blessed man. He has not 
lost. I have never regretted the experience of that 
night. 

A welcome home was related to me by a Con- 
federate soldier whom I met down in Alabama last 



Easter lOl 

week. He said he went home from the war with a 
wooden leg. On his way home he was hopping along 
from one place to another, and occasionally some 
man with a mule would help him on his way. He 
had no other way of getting home. The surrender 
at Appomattox had left them all to go South, and 
so he started to walk home to Alabama. He went 
up the front entrance to the old plantation house 
where he had lived before the war, and his family 
were still there, and one or two of the colored 
servants had rem.ained. But as he went limping on 
his wooden leg, and he so worn, so dirty, so ragged, 
up to the house from which he went forth on a beau- 
tiful steed with such triumph, he said : "The horror 
of going into my own home was worse than the 
terrors of the battlefield." But he said they saw 
him coming, and they ran out, his two children and 
his wife, and they caught him by the arm, pulled 
him down, kissed him, and hugged him, and went 
rejoicing into the house. Although he had been 
defeated, and felt all the woes of a patriot who loved 
his state and felt that he had been unjustly defeated, 
yet as he said: "When I sat down by the fire, and 
they brought me some pone cake and butter, there 
by the light of my own hearth I rested for a little 
while after four years of service in the army, and 
there came a peace to me after all, in which I said : 
Ts it not all lost.' I have my family, and I can go 



102 Sermons for Great Days 

on yet/' He had his house, as many did not, and 
a Httle portion of a farm left to him free. To go 
into that home and be welcomed by those who 
sympathized with him, and to feel that they believed 
in him although all the rest of the world did not, 
was, after all, a compensation more than to be presi- 
dent of the United States, and better than to be a 
king. 

Oh, the joy of that heart that goes into its own 
citadel, into its own palace — that humble little home 
of two or three rooms, and sits down by the fire, 
believed in by those who sit by him, and who love 
him! They have no word of criticism for him. 
They have only encouragement. Their eyes are so 
filled with love they cannot see anything else but 
truth, hope, and goodness about him. To be 
lieved in, and to sit by one's domestic circle makes 
up for all the losses that can come to any man. 

How did the Pharisees spend Easter? What kind 
of an Easter was that to those who had murdered 
the Son of God, who had sold Himi for a "mess of 
pottage," indeed? How did they feel? They had 
money. Oh, yes, but what is money compared with 
this firelight heat, this fireside rest, this burning of 
the heart in the presence of Christ? What was their 
money to them but a curse ! 

The thought is precious that Professor Cobern 
brought out with reference to the equity of God's 



Easter 103 

dealings with men. He never takes from us one 
thing without giving us something else in its place, 
if we only had the grace to see it. He never shuts 
one door to us without opening another, and if we 
only had the grace to fall in with His will and turn 
around and look the other way, we would see the 
open door every time. 

A young man studying for the ministry asked my 
advice only last Sabbath. He said the doors seemed 
to shut before him. Men have told me whenever I 
have related my experience, that they had the same, 
that God always opens another door whenever He 
shuts one. This young man had hoped to support 
himself in a certain position, and when he found 
the door was shut he turned away in an angry mood, 
and I told him to pray to God and look in other 
directions, and then the other door would open im- 
mediately. God always deals with those who love 
Him in that way. 

Sometimes we have to be given pain to know the 
best things. I did not mean to speak again of my 
personal experience. My father was a very severe 
man, a very decided man. He never showed any 
emotion, yet he was kind and considerate, and pro- 
vided for us well. Sometimes I felt: *^I wish I 
had a father like some other father. I wish I had 
a father who would take me upon his knee. I wish 
I had a father who would read to me. I wish I had 



104 Sermons for Great Days 

a father who would say a word of encouragement 
to me when I had done the best I could, and obeyed 
him and served him. I wish I had some one to say 
things to me like other fathers said to their boys/' 

One day I fell from the barn beams upon the 
floor, and was very severely hurt, though no bones 
were broken. I was brought in pale and uncon- 
scious. Then my busy father awoke. When the 
thought that he might have lost his child came to 
him he became the tenderest nurse I ever had. 
Mother or sister could not compare with father. 
Father's fingers were so tender, his hand so careful, 
and he could entertain me so nicely. He sat by my 
bed, and ate meals with me. He had never done 
all this before. I had found a father by falling 
from the beams of the barn. I would fall again 
to find another friend like that. 

When Cleopas and Simon had lost their Christ, 
as they thought, and were on their way home, it 
opened up to them an avenue of spiritual relation 
to spiritual things about which they seemed to un- 
derstand so little. Remember Christ was in the 
spirit, not in the body. You cannot call this human 
magnetism. He was in the spirit, and when He in- 
fluenced their spirits, when He awakened that am- 
bition in their hearts it was done by spiritual com- 
munication. It was done as Christ communicates 
with you now by the soul. In soul communication 



Easter 105 

nothing, certainly, could be called mental or mate- 
rial. 

God's teaching balances everything in some way. 
If you lose in this place, and you trust in God, you 
will find it in another. It is all the time being 
arranged by some mysterious law of God. Be it in 
our domestic life, in our church life, in our business 
life, or national life, or in our worship, God is mak- 
ing adjustments all the time to compensate. Cleopas 
and Simon had the richest compensation for what 
seemed lost by that presence of Christ, and in the 
assurance of His everlasting peace. The good old 
monk said that he thought Cleopas was overpaid for 
all he had lost. It had been more than made up 
by that peace of God. 

On that Easter day they were the happiest of 
men. Christ revealed himself, and their hearts 
burned within them with that domestic rest of con- 
science and of peace, the best possible way to observe 
Easter. 

Are you going to observe Easter near to Christ? 
Are you going to stand in such a relation to Him 
that He will come and influence you spiritually, and 
bring to you that firelight of domestic peace which 
cometh only to the heart that is at rest with God? 
Listen to Him now, to-night, and resolve that you 
will not pass that Easter day until you are safely 
in the ark of God. Resolve that you will not pass 



lo6 Sermons for Great Days 

that sacred time in the history of the year without 
being openly fully committed to the name of the 
Lord Jesus Christ. For to you as to His disciples 
He would say now, as He comes in the Spirit to 
you just the same way He came to them then : "My 
peace I give unto you. Not as the world giveth give 
I unto you. My peace, the peace of Gk>d that passeth 
all understanding, shall be yours." 



VII 
Mother s Day 

(MATTHEW Xi:il) 

THIS morning we take especial notice of the 
gift of God in our mothers, and this evening 
of the gift of God in our fathers. The text I have 
selected this morning is in the nth verse of the 
nth chapter of Matthew: 

"Among them that are bom of women there hath 
not arisen a greater than John the Baptist." 

I suppose in association with our parents there is 
left some memento somewhere in the house, or will 
be left in future years, of our mothers when living, 
and it will guide us into a devotional spirit. I will 
read a poem by Miss Eliza Cook, one of the stand- 
ards, one of the classics on this subject, entitled 
"The Old Armchair.'' 

"I love it — I love it, and who shall dare 

To chide me for loving that old armchair ! 

Fve treasured it long as a sainted prize — 

Tve bedewed it with tears, and embalmed it with 

sighs; 

107 



lo8 Sermons for Great Days 

'Tis bound by a thousand bands to my heart, 
Not a tie will break, not a link will start. 
Would you learn the spell? A mother sat there; 
And a sacred thing is that old armchair. 

"In childhood's hour I linger near 

The hallowed seat with listening ear; 

And gentle words that mother would give, 

To fit me to die, and teach me to live. 

She told me shame would never betide, 

With truth for my creed, and God for my guide ; 

She taught me to lisp my earliest prayer. 

As I knelt beside that old armchair. 

'T sat and watched her many a day. 

When her eyes grew dim and her locks were gray, 

And I almost worshipped her when she smiled 

And turned from her Bible to bless her child. 

Years rolled on, but the last one sped — 

My idol was shattered — my earth star fled : 

I learnt how much the heart can bear, 

When I saw her die in that old armchair.'* 

Directly in 'connection with that I would read an 
extract from one of Dr. Talmadge's sermons, and 
one that is selected as of his very best. Dr. Tal- 
madge sometimes was inspired into flights of elo- 
quence in which he lost himself, and those were his 



Mother s Day 109 

best moments, and this was one as he speaks of 
his own wild youth and his return to his mother : 

*'I go a Httle farther on in your house and I find 
the mother's chair. It is very apt to be a rocking- 
chair. She had so many cares and troubles to 
soothe, that it must have rockers. I remember it 
well. It was an old chair, and the rockers were al- 
most worn out, for I was the youngest, and the 
chair had rocked the whole family. It made a 
creaking noise as it moved, but there was music 
in the sound. It was just high enough to allow 
us children to put our heads into her lap. That 
was the bank where we deposited all our hurts and 
worries. Oh, what a chair that was. It was dif- 
ferent from the father's chair — it was entirely 
different. You ask me how? I cannot tell, but we 
all felt it was different. Perhaps there was about 
this chair more gentleness, more tenderness, more 
grief when we had done wrong. When we were 
wayward, father scolded, but mother cried. It was 
a very wakeful chair. In the sick day of children, 
other chairs could not keep awake ; that chair always 
kept awake — kept easily awake. That chair knew 
all the old lullabies, and all those wordless songs 
which mothers sing to their sick children — songs in 
which all pity and compassion and sympathetic in- 
fluences are combined. That old chair has stopped 
rocking for a good many years. It may be set up 



110 Sermons for Great Days 

in the loft or the garret, but it holds a queenly 
power yet. When at midnight you went into that 
grog-shop to get the intoxicating draught, did you 
not hear a voice that said, 'My son, why go in there T 
and a louder than the boisterous encore of the thea- 
ter, a voice saying, 'My son, what do you here?' 
And when you went into the house of sin, a voice 
saying, 'What would your mother do if she knew 
you were here?' and you were provoked at your- 
self, and you charged yourself with superstition and 
fanaticism, and your head got hot with your own 
thoughts, and you went to bed, and no sooner had 
you touched the bed than a voice said, 'What, a 
prayerless pillow !' Man ! what is the matter ? This ! 
You are too near your mother's rocking-chair. 'Oh, 
pshaw!' you say, 'there's nothing in that. I'm five 
hundred miles off from -where I was born — I'm three 
thousand miles off from the Scotch kirk whose bell 
was the first music I ever heard.' I cannot help that. 
You are too near your mother's rocking-chair. 'Oh !' 
you say, ^there can't be anything in that ; that chair 
has been vacant a great while.' I cannot help that. 
It is all the mightier for that ; it is omnipotent, that 
vacant mother's chair. It whispers. It speaks. It 
weeps. It carols. It mourns. It prays. It warns. 
It thunders. A young man went off and broke his 
mother's heart, and while he was away from his 
home his mother died, and the telegraph brought the 



Mother s Day ill 

son, and he came into the room where she lay, and 
looked upon her face, and cried out: *'0 mother, 
mother, what your life could not do your death shall 
effect. This moment I give my heart to God/ And 
he kept his promise. Another victory for the vacant 
chair. With reference to your mother, the words 
of my text were fulfilled : *Thou shalt be missed 
because thy seat will be empty.' " 

I will quote again. God said of a true mother: 
"Her children rise up and call her blessed." 

Cicero said: "The real empire is by the fire- 
side.'^ 

Napoleon said: "The great need of France is 
mothers." 

Mohammed said: "Paradise is at the feet of 
mothers." 

Henry Clay died saying: "Mother — ^mother — 
mother." 

Abraham Lincoln said : "All that I am I owe to 
my sainted mother." 

Ruskin said : "Every impetus for good I find in 
my soul came from my mother." 

The text I selected this morning with reference to 
John the Baptist makes the very strong statement, 
"There was never born of woman one greater than 
John the Baptist." A great man was John the Bap- 
tist, mighty not only in physique, but in brain, moral 
force, and in vigorous courage. You can compare 



112 Sermons for Great Days 

him with Cicero, or with Napoleon, or Alexander 
the Great, and find him greater than they in every 
manly attribute. Jesus himself said: 'There has 
not been born of woman a greater than John the 
Baptist,'' and thus lays the cause of his greatness, 
and places the reason for his power that he was 
''born of woman." 

You have read in your Bible that expression again 
and again. Job uses it, and said: "Man, born of 
woman'' has done this, or done that, or been great, 
or been high. Why does he use the expression, 
"Man born of woman?" Evidently because not- 
withstanding the Bible says so little comparatively 
in the number of its words concerning woman, it 
does everywhere give credit to the mother for every 
great man, and for every great movement. People 
have tried to criticise the Word of God, by saying 
that it was not fair towards the women, that it did 
not give them their rightful place, and yet the 
Saviour Himself gives John the Baptist's mother the 
credit for the greatness of character which distin- 
guished him . By so doing He showed a knowledge 
of the laws of nature that are far beyond our present 
understanding. 

The study of the philosophy of history, which has 
become a very deep and well-founded science, shows 
that nearly all, or, so far as we can trace, all, the 
great geniuses of the world inherited their special 



Mother s Day 113 

gifts from their mothers. I am speaking now of 
special men. When the Bible gives the history of 
great warriors, great kings, great musicians, great 
composers, and of those great in the ranks of litera- 
ture, or of mighty statesmen, it always credits the 
mother with that gift. It is a curious thing to find 
in the study of this subject that great men are 
usually their "mother's sons," and great women 
are their ''father's daughters," in an expressive, 
moral, intellectual sense. There are exceptions to 
it seemingly. But the exceptions prove the ruleJ 
You recall in your own case, perhaps, that your 
mother was very kind to you when you had done 
wrong; that your mother would counsel you, and 
she would sometimes hide your tricks and disobedi- 
ence from your father. . remember as my mother's 
boy — I was her younges. — how she encouraged me, 
how she overlooked my weakness, and how she 
prayed with me. On the other hand, I remember my 
father had a switch — two or three — of the very 
hardest ironwood, and whenever I did wrong and 
he knew it, that switch was to come down and I 
was to feel it — hard, fierce justice, combined under 
all with a tender love. If I hurt myself, did I run 
to my father ? No, it was to my mother I went that 
she might kiss away the pain. You did the same. 
We are alike in human nature. 

My sister, oh, my sister. WL never I wanted to 



114 Sermons for Great Days 

go on a vacation, or get away from work, I did not 
go to my father and ask. Oh, no, I sought some 
time when my sister was especially good natured, 
and went quietly around and would give her an 
apple, or promise to do ''all her errands" if she would 
use her influence to get my father to let me go to 
the cattle show, circus, or some other place I desired 
to visit. The power behind the throne of my father 
was my sister, and she was my ''father's child." Any- 
n thing she would ask for within reason was granted 

at once. My father used to tell us boys : "You must 
remember she is a woman. She is a girl. You must 
be kind to her, take care of her, give up to her, 
and let her have everything she wants." The hazy 
impression upon me is that if mother had not been 
there to interfere, my sister would have had every- 
thing, and we boys would have been turned out so 
far as I can look back into history. That is not an 
unusual experience. It is so everywhere. 

The world throughout all its ages of history has 
been just the same. Napoleon was the pet of his 
mother. Alexander the Great was the darling of 
his mother. Abraham Lincoln was especially 
favored of his mother. And so with the great men 
of our country. I glanced through a biographical 
dictionary, and find in every case, so far as I looked, 
and I must have looked at fifty of our great names, 
they accredited all their inspiration to their mother. 



Mother s Day 115 

The great men of the world, consequently, are espe- 
cially the creation of the mother. They inherit the 
ideas of the mother. They inherit the mind of the 
mother. They inherit the moral purposes of the 
mother. Hence, when great men have blessed the 
world, we must in truth give the most of the credit 
to the mother. 

It requires no reminder, perhaps, from me, to say 
that the mother in the home holds the great place 
of power. Cicero was right about it when he said, 
''The empire is at the fireside," and the men have 
the physical and mental strength to rule the world, 
and will physically rule it whether women vote or 
not. Physical strength must rule the world whether 
or no, and power is not going to become weakness 
by the changing of any of our elective systems. 
But these men who rule the world, these men that 
have made the laws at which women may rightfully 
complain, are the men whom woman made. They 
are the product of the mother, not only by inherit- 
ance, but especially the product of the mother by the 
teaching at her knee. 

The boy does not forget his mother's chair. He 
cannot forget his mother's advice. Though there 
may be fathers that are like mothers and mothers 
that are like fathers, yet as a great rule running 
through the history of mankind, this is true, that the 
boy is what the mother makes him. If women 



Ii6 Sermons for Great Days 

should by any means, possibly by some miraculous 
turn, relieve themselves of the responsibility of teach- 
ing the young, they v^ould lose far more than they 
could possibly gain. Is this government vicious to- 
day? Is there v^Ickedness and dishonesty In high 
places ? It is due to the mother's teaching, and some 
woman Is responsible for v^hat these men do. If she 
has tried to escape that responsibility, she has tried to 
disobey the privileges and commandments of God. 
There is no place like the home In which to impress 
those thoughts and to make that moral character 
which shall guide In after life, and it is in the home 
that the mother has her especial throne of power. 

Again I repeat It, and It ought to be repeated every 
morning and night, that women are responsible for 
what the men do, and the men for what the women 
do. Men have usually, by Inheritance, the character 
of their mother's line. It Is a great scientific truth, 
not a fancy or a superstition. It seems to be some 
great plan of God to equalize In this world the rela- 
tion of the sexes, so that men should not have an 
inheritance all their own. But that from the male 
side it should cross to the female side, and from the 
female side to the male side, in order that equality 
might still reign among the men and women of the 
world. A perfect equality, whether man or woman, 
is the final outcome of God's teachings. 

It is an interesting thing to study biology and 



Mother s Day 117 

anthropology, and find God in them, for students 
always do. They come back at last to God, and the 
first Great Cause. Those who have done the finest 
work, from Pasteur and Virchow to the present day, 
upon biology, have found that that particle of proto- 
plasm which will develop into a dog, a bird, or an 
elephant, or a man, are of precisely the same chemi- 
cal substance. Who then shall decide whether this 
particle of protoplasm shall be a dog, an elephant or 
a man, and whether male or female ? Who decides 
this ? It is the spiritual realm ; it is beyond the phy- 
sical, for in the physical they are identical. But some 
impression from above brought to bear upon them 
guides this development. 

After our great Civil War, when more than 700,- 
000 men had been killed, or had been so injured 
that they died within ten years of the war, who had 
to do with the guidance of the results of the war? 
In just thirty-three years^ — one generation — after 
that war the equality had been restored, and it had 
been restored by the birth of twice the number of 
boys than there were girls, thus supplying the place 
of the killed on the battlefield by some dispensation 
of providence that is beyond the possible research of 
scientific men. The Lord has decided that the gene- 
rations of men following one after another shall 
come along of equal number, that one generation 



Ii8 Sermons for Great Days 

shall be mentally feminine and the next shall be 
masculine. 

The Saviour himself said : **There is not a greater 
born of woman'' — speaking especially of the mother 
— 'There is not a product of a mother on earth 
greater than John the Baptist/' thus giving credit 
here, as they gave it throughout the old prophets, to 
the mother for the great men. The mother holds a 
place next to God. So long as it is natural for men 
to honor mankind, it is natural for a real man to 
respect and admire all that is beautiful, lovely, sweet 
and righteous about women. It is natural for the 
reverse to be the case also. Even with an attempt 
to shut out all that bias of natural feeling, we find 
that a mother is a home-making being, a nestmaker, 
who holds the place of supreme influence in the mak- 
ing of the human race now. Consequently, being a 
homemaker, she is the nation builder. She builds up 
the civilization of our Christian age. She makes 
our churches what they are because she moulds, as 
I have said before, in that home the characters that 
are afterwards to touch human life. She is ''almost 
divine,'' in some respects. 

A woman is a very contradictory thing. I do not 
think a man ever understands a woman, and the 
way the women treat each other leads me to think 
they don't understand each other. They are, per- 
haps, more of a mystery to each other than to the 



Mother s Day 119 

men. How can a woman be so good and so bad? 
How can they represent such great extremes? A 
woman that falls into sin or wickedness is more vile, 
degraded, and hell-like than a man ever can be. But 
when she is in the home in a normal condition as a 
mother, she seems next to God. 

The Bible says the women shall be saved ''by child 
bearing.'' I cannot understand how a woman can 
keep away from God who has a little child of her 
own to love her here. 'They shall be saved by child 
bearing." The Mormons put great emphasis upon 
that, that a woman by the number of her children 
shall get her reward in heaven. They over empha- 
sized it, but nevertheless the Bible does give the 
foundation thought that women shall be saved by 
child bearing. A mother's love is so like Christ's 
that we cannot separate them. No knife can draw 
the line between the love of a mother and the love 
of Christ. A mother's love is wholly unselfish, and 
entirely self-giving. She lives next to the Master 
of us all in this, that she loves, and works, and sac- 
rifices with no hope, or no expectation or care, for 
a return. Utterly unselfish is the devotion of a 
mother to a helpless babe. She gives her life, shuts 
out everything of experience that she enjoyed, and 
endures suffering of all sorts and kinds, privations 
of every variety, to take care of that little, sick, help- 
less child — utterly giving of herself without thought 



120 Sermons for Great Days 

of how great the sacrifice is to that helpless being 
that cannot make any return to her at present, and a 
mother's selfishness never runs ahead in that way. A 
mother's unselfish love is like that of Christ. A 
mother's constant observance of innocence and weak- 
ness is a training into righteousness, into the beauty 
of holiness, into an appreciation of Christ's great 
atonement for men, that a man has but few oppor- 
tunities to experience. Oh, a mother's love we need 
not emphasize. You know it. I know it. We all un- 
derstand something of it. To me it is the great ex- 
ponent, the great expounder of the love of God. A 
mother's love for a crippled little child is like Christ's 
love, as near as you or I can ever appreciate or under- 
stand. 

Why then do we observe this day of days? Be- 
cause we wish to praise God for the gift of a mother. 
The men wish to emphasize it because we are espe- 
cially the product of our mothers. By emphasizing 
the mother's life and home, and by bringing our at- 
tention clearly to a mother's love, we are training 
ourselves into a habit of mind that will enable us 
to worship God through our mothers; and beyond 
her, through the Lord Jesus Christ. If a man loveth 
not his mother, he cannot love God. The Bible 
saith: 'Tf he loveth not his brother, how can he 
love God, whom he hath not seen." If a man love 



Mother s Day I2l 

not his mother, he cannot appreciate the love of 
Christ. The two are impossible separate, and they 
are probably always together. The mother that 
loves with a sincere, maternal devotion the child to 
which she has given birth stands so near the border 
line of serving Christ and loving God that it is an 
easy matter for her to step over, and for the sacrifices 
she makes God gives her a great return. He does 
give finally a great return. The love of a mother^ 
if we emphasize and appreciate it more and more, 
will draw us men, as it does all women, nearer ta 
the Lord Jesus Christ, who loved us in our weak- 
ness and sinfulness so much that He gave himself 
unselfishly, wholly for us. I Not for himself did He 
live or die, not for Himself did He suffer on the 
cross, but, like a mother, gave Himself up altogether, 
and gave Himself up, among others, for His own 
mother. When dying in those excruciating pains. 
He turned attention to His mother and provided 
for her. A few minutes before He died His last 
thoughts turned to his mother, and He said to his 
best friend, John, ^'Behold thy mother.'' Take her 
to thy home and be a son unto her for My sake.) 
So I say, He who loved His own mother, and in 
His dying hours of the greatest possible pain thought 
of her and provided for her, cometh to-day and 
puts before us this thought, that we may to-day, 



122 Sermons for Great Days 

wherever our mothers may be, do by them as a son 
or daughter ought to do; and if they are gone, we 
will bring them again to mind, and let them in 
heaven see that we love them with a love that is 
everlasting. 



VIII 
Use of Decoration Day 

(luke 11:14) 

TO-NIGHT in connection with Memorial Day 
I have selected for my text the 14th verse of 
the Second Chapter of Luke — **Glory to God and on 
earth peace with good will toward men." 

The sermon which I shall try in the few minutes 
to preach is a sermon from that great surgeon, Dr. 
Earnest Laplace, of Philadelphia. If I say anything 
worth while it is due to the Doctor's promptings as 
he suggested this text to me on the train this week 
— "on earth peace with good will toward men." It 
is not a new thought, it is an old one, — and the 
old ones are often the best, as old friends are the 
best. This is one of the old principles that cannot 
be reiterated too often, but especially in our land 
now — "Peace with good will toward men." 

We are striving to obtain peace and we believe 
now that America is so situated that it may bring 
about another association of nations that shall re- 
store peace to the whole world. When the Lord 

does not bring us into a workable relation with one 

123 



124 Sermons for Great Days 

system of peace he always opens up another way. 
He has to this nation given another opportunity. 
We could not make peace with the conditions that 
we had ; but now we are approaching a position where 
we can secure peace under other conditions. God 
always gives peace to His sincere servants, even 
though they be nations, and now peace is coming 
to us. There are various kinds of peace in this 
world. We must not accept any kind but the right 
kind. 

There is a peace by force, — a peace in which fear 
brings about, that quietness which comes from con- 
ditions when men fear destruction. They are quiet 
rather than suffer. That kind of peace is the one 
the world has been seeking. 

France is seeking that peace with Germany that 
can be accomplished by the absolute military power 
to so cover Germany with her forces or so sur- 
round her with military preparations that Germany 
shall not dare to disobey. That is the peace France 
desires to see in Germany. I speak as a friend of 
France when I make that distinct statement. Ger- 
many's military forces may sometime break out into 
war but she keeps quiet now under fear. They do 
not pretend to state that they are going to keep 
the promises they make. They say they make them 
under duress, and consequently are under no moral 
obligations to keep them. They make treaties be- 



Use of Decoration Day 125 

cause they are compelled to do so and they keep 
the peace now for that reason. 

This great principle is so universal in its applica- 
tion that on this Memorial Day our duty appears 
clear. I will illustrate it for a few minutes. There 
are homes in which the husband and father is a 
fearful tyrant. He himself thinks he is not. But 
he is a monarch who is feared, feared by his wife 
lest she should do something or say something that 
would be provoking him. She would disturb the 
home if she did not keep quiet. The children go 
about the house on tip-toe or nearly so, they do not 
speak above whispers because that feared tyrant 
is in the house. That is a home where peace is 
preserved by force. There are schools in which 
the teacher is one of those metallic, harsh and hard 
types so that the children there do keep quiet. One 
of the quietest schools in the world may be one where 
children fear a blow, or a sharp word, or some other 
punishment, and consequently there is peace in the 
school. The same applies to business houses where 
the clerks go about doing their duty for fear of 
criticism or fearing the eye of some one who is go- 
ing to swear at them ; or they fear the loss of their 
position or reduction of pay. There are churches 
where the dictation comes from one person. 

I see it continually, men fear to make or ex- 
press any thought of their own, for fear of being 



126 Sermons for Great Days 

considered unorthodox; or fear of offending the 
man in the pulpit or the priest. 

There are nations which are kept at peace by the 
emperor or the king or some autocracy hke that of 
Russia. Russia is quiet, Russia is at peace and 
Lenine is the dictator. They fear the assassinations, 
the murders, the hangings that might follow action. 
They keep the peace there, it is peace of fear. That 
is not the peace that Christ came to proclaim. It is 
the peace with good will toward men ; and the time 
is coming, for it says that this message is to all 
people, when the earth shall be at peace with ''good 
will" toward men. A permanent kind of peace is 
that. 

The soldier who claims to be a great patriot and 
loves his country does not like to see a peace under 
force, he does not wish to see the people crushed 
under the harsh, hard hand of law. The patriot 
who loves his country wishes to have quietness on 
earth, but the quietness must be that which comes 
with good will, with good intentions, with earnest 
and sincere friendships among people. The patri- 
otic men of to-day, brought to mind by this Memorial 
Day have fought for a peace with ''good will.'' 
They have not sought for a great navy and a great 
army which shall expend our territories as in the 
past. They are not seeking wealth in order that we 
may force some nation to do as we compell them to 



Use of Decoration Day 127 

do. It may be necessary sometimes to maintain 
peace by force. It is necessary when some people 
would rebel. It is necessary to have a police force, 
it is necessary perhaps to have a navy upon the sea 
for some small purposes. But for all the purposes of 
future warfare it is a great mistake to build any 
such armament. Because it is breaking down and 
hindering the peace for which we are continually 
praying. 

The true patriot is a patriot who loves to see 
good will toward men. The soldier who went to war 
with ill will toward men, who may have gone with in- 
dignation in his heart at the time, as it would have 
been but natural, and who may have in his heart 
determined to kill the enemy, will cease that hatred 
when the enemy has laid down his arms. Then 
the great and true soldier is one who determines 
that there shall be a peace worth while; General 
Grant made himself, at the end of the Civil War, 
most unpopular by saying, "let us have peace.'' But 
he advocated as did Abraham Lincoln — peace with 
the Southern people, friendship towards them, try- 
ing to forget the things they had done which we 
thought wrong and overlook them and have one re- 
united nation of good will, — the good will of the 
North towards the South, and of the South towards 
the North. 

The soldier who went to the war, — volunteered 



128 Sermons for Great Days 

to go because it was the great cause of Christ, when 
I say of Christ I mean ''the peace on earth and 
good will toward men," was a wise patriot. If all 
the soldiers of the war had been claimed or had been 
forced into the war or had been men like BergdoU, 
what kind of an army would we have had? Why 
did we want Bergdoll in the American army? I 
would like to know, where is the good sense of our 
people ? We do not want any Bergdoll in the army, 
we are not fighting for any such cause as that he 
could represent. It would be dangerous to the na- 
tion to have such traitors in our army. It was a 
great and foolish mistake of our nation when it 
''drafted'' men for the army. It should have left it 
open for patriotic enlistment, and the people could 
have been brought up to that patriotic pitch where 
in order to bring peace among the nation with good 
will toward men they would cheerfully die. But 
by drafting the men it left the soldier under possible 
inference of cowardice. 

We find here and there a soldier arrested for mur- 
der, here are five men arrested for robbing a bank 
and they say that is the kind that were drafted. But 
the victories we won were won where the great ma- 
jority of our soldiers sought to bring about peace 
with good will among all nations and hasten the 
time when there should be a universal parliament. 



Use of Decoration Day 129 

and when all nations should bow to the parliamentary 
dictates. 

We are now in a position to open up our com- 
merce with Germany, with Austria, with Bulgaria. 
Were we now to open up our commerce and begin 
the exchange of commodities, both parties will be 
making something out of the transactions and fra- 
ternal acquaintanceship would compel Germany for 
a century to come to do that which we want her 
to do? On the contrary, the further use of force 
will sometime awaken the great volcanoes, which 
are gathering force that by and by will bring on an- 
other great world war. We are only postponing 
war by adopting a peace by force now. The time 
has come to the American people to seek a peace 
with good will — to try to forget and to overlook as 
far as possible, and enter into frank fraternal rela- 
tions with all nations of the earth. We are fighting 
the same cause now that we fought more than a hun- 
dred years ago when the little colonies broke away 
from England. They did not break away from 
England because they wished to accomplish anything 
exclusively selfish, but they represented the great 
cause of liberty, the freedom of the people and the 
independence for each conscience before God. 

Suppose we should try to permanently force Ger- 
many to keep the peace as that is in the minds of the 
people still! That would only breed war. The 



130 Sermons for Great Days 

American people are coming to the Christian view, 
to compel her to keep the peace by peaceful meth- 
ods. There are sixty million of people there, and 
we have a hundred million. Suppose that sixty 
million people were roused up at one time with 
spiritual fervor, and those sixty million of people 
were to be united with good will to each other, with 
friendships, tried and true to themselves and their 
nation, it would take the whole world again to con- 
quer Germany. Suppose sixty millions of people 
were all we had in this country, suppose some con- 
queror were to assail this country when we had 
sixty million people roused to a patriotic fervor, a' 
determination in the sight of God and in the sight 
of man to resist unto death. Our own flag and our 
own nation would stand against the world. For 
when our colonies rebelled against England, England 
was a mighty empire on which the sun never set, 
the greatest in the world, and these poor little col- 
onies over here had an army less than 100,000 
to put against an empire. See what they accom- 
plished and fought out because of the absolute com- 
mon consecration to the cause of human liberty, with 
the determination to stand together through starva- 
tion. 

If Germany shall by and by feel so oppressed or 
so unfairly dealt with ; reduced it maybe to less than 
she has now, yet that people once aroused with that 



Use of Decoration Day 131 

common instinct of self-preservation will believe 
that their cause is the cause of God. Nowhere on the 
earth can an intelligent people be conquered if they 
are united with a common good will towards each 
other and toward God. 

Germany is now divided into her provinces, her 
political parties quarrel among themselves, hence she 
is very weak now. But when the coming of that spirit 
of fraternity shall unite them all in one conscientious 
union then what are navies, what are armies? 

I would not state that we now have any reason to 
fear Germany. I want to illustrate what might be 
if we strive to keep peace by force. Force can only 
end in revolution, and what the revolution will bring 
forth no man can foresee. 

Japan is not fully peaceful with us, and she has 
reason to feel that way because of discrimination 
against her citizens when they come into this coun- 
try. They are not allowed the same privileges in 
the ownership of property or in becoming citi- 
zens, as are other nations. We cannot blame them 
for feeling they are wronged under oppressing con- 
ditions like that. We must move very slowly in 
our reforms, yet must express our good will to Japan 
very soon or else there is warfare on the Pacific. 
With France or England on her side and Russia her 
tally how great will be the warfare for the years to 
come, a warfare of force, warfare of ill will. 



132 Sermons for Great Days 

We must not submit to things that are shameful, 
to things that are weak, and we are not to show 
cowardice, but we are to show good will, and treat 
Japan fairly so that the people of Japan will love 
us, that the people of Japan may turn in with us and 
help us. We may need them by and by. 

They want peace in Ireland; and they are quite 
sure to have peace there now ; and it is better to have 
peace of some kind than to have none. There is no 
question but what old England is aroused now and 
i ,when England really feels excited there is going to 
be a large army in Ireland ; and when they fill every 
village and every farm in all of Ireland with soldiers 
there will be a peace. But do you think it will be a 
permanent peace? Can it be permanent under such 
conditions ? They may for a while accomplish this 
purpose, but the one great end will not thus be se- 
cured, — ^the peace of good will. 

I was in West Virginia this week and I went over 
that region in the mining strike, where they have 
been fighting so fearfully of late, where they have 
been shooting each other on the street and across 
the little river and carried it on for months; and 
they have called out the troops to quell the rebel- 
lion. I talked to the people and saw the train that 
had been fired upon a day or two before. They told 
me there would be no peace there until there was 
*'good will," until the owners of these mines were 



Use of Decoration Day 133 

willing to meet the miners on an equal basis and 
treat them like free men. There must sometime be 
good will. The only thing that can bring peace to 
the mining strikers in West Virginia is the advocacy 
of the cause of Jesus Christ, — good will to men — 
and the nation ought to insist that in West Virgina 
there shall be good will, or else those people be scat- 
tered where they will be too weak to disturb in any 
united movement. Something must be done to ac- 
complish good will between the strikers and their 
employers. It is astonishing how a little ill will can 
bring about great terrific results. 

Did it ever occur to you that America still is 
ruled by so few people? This boasted democracy 
where men and women have a right to vote, each 
the equal of any other. How few people rule this 
empire, how few. We support our courts and pay 
their expenses, we use police force throughout the 
city and pay their expenses, we give up our rights 
to go to certain places and do certain things, sur- 
rendering our rights in order that they may capture 
or keep quiet a few criminals. To that extent the 
criminals rule. They say there are more murders 
since the war. But I have sometimes counted up in 
the newspapers the number of murders and wondered 
why there were so few in a nation of one hundred 
million. A hundred million give up their rights be- 
cause these few criminals occupy such a place of 



134 Sermons for Great Days 

danger; that little minority of criminals are really 
controlling the vast majority. 

We passed the great prohibitory amendment in 
which a hundred million people give up their right to 
take certain things which they think harmless, while 
many of them thought it did them good. Thus a 
few men command the many. The amendment was 
passed, and there is more rum sold and more profits 
made. It requires only an open eye for a day to 
see that there is more rum sold now than ever before; 
more people drunken now. They get it now clandes- 
tinely and the government gets no tax on it. It has 
spread far and wide and yet when I read in the paper 
of the number who were arrested for drunkenness, 
and out of two million people thirty-eight were ar- 
rested for drunkenness, and in two days fifty-eight 
only of two million were drunk. But because they 
were drunk, we of the two million surrender our 
wishes in the matter, all of which we feel it a duty 
to do. Because there are only a few people who 
do these things that are wrong, we are governed by 
a very small minority. There is always a time in the 
history of a nation when a single individual must 
be its dictator, when one man must have all power 
in order to accomplish what the nation should ac- 
compHsh; we had it so in Wilson's administration, 
we made him emperor of the country, because it was 
better that the minority of one out of one hundred 



Use of Decoration Day 135 

million should control the whole country. Thei 
small minority that control this country is shown 
in the peace we have at home. In the city of Phila- 
delphia there are a few men who really control our 
political affairs and the number is amazingly small. 
When you wish to accomplish something for the pub- 
lic good you do not have to see more than a few 
people in Philadelphia to accomplish anything you 
desire if they agree with you. It is a peace rule; 
sometimes it is a very dangerous rule, sometimes a 
good rule. But the American democracy is gov- 
erned by a very few people. But if these few people 
have in their hearts ''good will" then it is the best 
government in the world. 

There is no government better than a kingdom. 
Christ is the King of the Christian kingdom. There 
is no government of better form than the one which 
has a few people to control the government, provided 
"good wiir' be in the heart of the president or the 
emperor or in the hearts of the autocracy — provided 
always that their purpose be true. Then they are 
the fathers of their people and the people can go 
their peaceful way and trust the administration to 
them. All nations must have their leaders and to 
get good will among these leaders is our first great 
duty. We must get good will in our president, in 
our Senate, in the courts among the judges, among 
all parties. We must do this with reference to the 



136 Sermons for Great Days 

administration of law. We must be sure that the 
people have good intentions. 

Now the peace of the future depends very much 
upon President Harding and we must pray for him, 
work with him and his great influence should be used 
to bring about peace upon the earth, friendships, 
solid good will. 

We are now desirous of organizing a new society 
that shall preserve all that has been done and unite 
all nations In one common association for the pur- 
pose of peace. That Is the work of this nation and 
on this Memorial Day when we are thinking of 
those who have died for the country. We should 
pray heartily that the government of our nation may 
have a good will towards all nations of the earth, 
that It may entertain no hatred of any nation, enter- 
tain no prejudices, may have no disposition to be 
jealous of any nation but that it may be high and 
noble In Its purposes, honest In Its hearts, to be a 
friend of every nation on the face of this earth. 
Then shall we have the peace we are talking about 
now. Then shall we accomplish what the Lord came 
to accomplish. He said to all people there shall come 
a time when there shall be peace on earth with good 
will toward men. Let us drop our animosities, let 
us drop our hatred, let us get rid of our unfair com- 
petition, let us go In as a nation Into the coming 
year with a determination that the principles taught 



Use of Decoration Day 137 

by Jesus Himself shall be wrought out into the asso- 
ciation of nations, very soon to come. Now they 
have a 'league of nations" in which Germany is 
to be shut out. We cannot have any league of na- 
tions that shall bring about peace until all nations, 
without exception, come into it and with good will 
towards each other shall support its parliament and 
execute its decrees. 

BENEDICTION 

Oh Lord grant unto us that we may have peace 
in our homes, the peace that cometh from loving, 
good will among all people in that home and we pray 
Thee that in school, in business, in public affairs, in 
the Church we may have that peace which cometh 
from the loving determination to sink one's self in 
help of his fellowmen; and we pray for the peace 
among the nations which shall arise from the deter- 
mination of all people to be fraternal, trustful, for- 
giving and faithful in all things towards each other, 
and we pray that this coming of Christ, of peace 
with good will toward men, may be promoted on the 
morrow's Decoration Day, — ^may it have its influ- 
ence upon our nation and our nation upon the nations 
of the earth and may we feel that we have been 
drawn nearer to the peace that shall be permanent, 
to that peace of God which passeth all understanding. 
We ask it in Christ's Name. Amen. 



IX 

Sure to Blunder 

( ISAIAH xl:3i) 

Is this valley above the snake line?" Tlat ques- 
tion sounds queer to any one who does not know 
the Berkshire Hills of Massachusetts. Have you 
gloried in the myriad shades of living green, the 
fascinating, inviting glens and dear, lover-like nooks? 
Well! well! You have something yet to see. I 
think there are many gorgeous landscapes yet un- 
seen by the oldest boy. But the Berkshires, so fa- 
mous among poets, artists and novelists, are so ac- 
cessible ! But I began to speak about the snake line. 
It is not an imaginary line, although no one could 
stick a pin into the strange boundary. It is about 
twelve hundred feet above the level of the sea. All 
above that line on the mountain tops is a forbidden 
territory to poisonous snakes. For some strange rea- 
son even the professors of natural history do not 
explain why those wriggly, sneaking, hissing, crawl- 
ing, assassinating serpents are forbidden tO' go far- 
ther up the hills of God. They can curl in the leaves 
and watch for a deadly strike, when under beds of 

138 



Sure to Blunder 139 

colored lilies down on the plain, or they can peak 
out of their holes in the earth and leap forth at foxes, 
dogs, horses, cows or men who innocently come near. 
But they must stay below the line. Boys, girls 
and preachers can go out safely into thickets, climb 
clififs and feel their way through dark forests of pine 
or cedar, if they only are careful to keep above the 
snake boundary. But down nearer the sea level, 
death lurks under the blueberry bushes, and the rat- 
tlesnakes bite the barefooted boy seeking blackberries 
by the highway. A very rich family from Newport 
placed their cottage in a lovely but low valley near the 
Hampshire Highlands of the Berkshire range, and 
one day a girl visitor was so bitten that the poison 
left her a cripple, and it was a hard task to save her 
life. Poor thing ! Her father had millions, but she 
visited friends who lived below the snake line. Those 
who live on the mountain tops are not in such dan- 
ger because the God of nature says to the fanged 
assassin, ''Keep down in the low lands and hide in 
the swamps, or die." So when the serpents used 
to be more plenty and their bites less curable by anti- 
dotes, the first inquiry by a new settler was alv/ays, 
''Is the land above the snake line?" If the hill or 
valley where he wished to place his home was below 
the snake border it could not be sold to any wise one 
for a home. Dwellers down there used to get up in 
the morning and find long creatures coiled under 



140 Sermons for Great Days 

their beds, and children have been found playing 
with poisonous serpents on the front veranda or on 
the barn floor. It is not a pleasant thing to think 
about or to talk about, so we will come at our gospel 
by another route. You have seen an eagle's nest, 
perhaps, in a museum or zoological garden, or in a 
picture, and the birds who build them are strong, 
hardy, wise birds. They always make their majestic 
homes above the snake line, and they consider it to 
be their business, too, to make the valleys safer be- 
low the strange boundary. 

There was a deep valley near an old homestead in 
the Berkshire, and I knew a boy once who used to 
watch the eagles while he was going after the cows, 
evening after evening. The old father eagle would 
fly down the valley and light on an old broken tree, 
and watch and watch for his enemy, the poisonous 
rattler. If he caught a glimpse of the speckled ser- 
pent down by the brook or in the tall grass, he 
would patiently sit there and wait with his great 
wings half spread, ready for a fatal swoop down 
on the snake. Sometimes when the watch lasted 
several days the old gray mother eagle would take 
the father's place while he went off fishing or forag- 
ing elsewhere to support their little family up among 
the rocks. But one or the other was sure to be on 
hand when the serpent became careless and risked a 
bath in the sunshine. The boy reported often week 



Sure to Blunder 141 

after week that the old eagle was still watching on 
that crag, and the boy's father would say, *'0h, yes, 
the old bird is wise enough to know that snakes have 
too little sense to keep out of sight long/' Even the 
oldest serpent was sure to blunder somewhere some 
day. The assassin in his hole knew that he was not 
permitted to enter the paradise of the hill tops, but 
he judged other people by himself and concluded that 
an eagle was as uneasy and careless as himself. He 
miscalculates; he blunders. The greatest victories 
of history have been most often won through some 
blunder of the enemy. A great general counts on 
that, and watches for the mistakes of his enemies. 
The Devil, all evil men, all liars, all thieves, and all 
sinners are blunderers. It is always a foolish mistake 
to do wrong. Sin is snake-like foolishness ; and in 
time his wickedness will ensnare the evil doer him- 
self. In any game or sport, like tennis, baseball, 
racing or household plays, the mistake of your op- 
ponent counts for you. So in the awful contests of 
good men and angels with the leaders of evil, the 
sinner will give over the battle by some silly blunder, 
and will in any case finally fail, if the eagle or a good 
man or woman watches and waits long enough. So 
the eagle, like a brave Christian, is not only a resi- 
dent above the society of the wicked, but he goes 
down into the infested valley and gives battle to 
the serpents who lurk for the lives of men. 



142 Sermons for Great Days 

Sometimes the cowboy would wonder why God 
made any serpents, and why God let wicked men 
and temptations to wrong exist in the world any- 
where. But he did not find out why. He concluded 
that he was not to know why, but decided that he 
did know that there are evil boys and evil girls, and 
poisonous snakes in the world, and hoped he would 
never be like them. 

At last that old sentinel eagle was rewarded, for 
his vigil, and the horrid serpent ventured out to seize 
a beautiful innocent bird which flew down to the 
brook for a bath. Then like a lightning stroke the 
vengeance of God in the eagle swooped down with 
sharp talons and bayonet beak, and when the boy 
looked far up in the sky the great wings of the 
eagle slowly swept dignifiedly through the upper 
air toward the Eyrie where the applauding family 
waited for the warrior's return, and in the hard 
talons of the great bird swung along the poisonous 
reptile, harmless and dead. 

Boys, girls, men, all, who are human, have the 
strange privilege of choosing whether they will be 
poisonous snakes or majestic eagles. They can 
choose to live out of evil associations above the snake 
line. They can help up and defend those who are 
still down in evil temptations and in dangerous lo- 
calities. They can watch and wait and in due time 
in the power of God swoop down upon evil and bear 



Sure to Blunder 143 

off in triumph the enemy of Christ. Boys! choose 
your home, and in thought, feehng, intention and 
companions, Hve ever above the snake line. Be Hke 
unto the eagles mentioned in the fortieth chapter of 
Isaiah, where it says that "they that wait upon the 
Lord shall renew their strength and shall mount up 
with wings as eagles.'* 



X 

'^Graduation Thoughts'^ 

(DEUTERONOMY XXXIig, 20) 

THIS morning my text I have chosen from the 
30th chapter of Deuteronomy, the 19th and 
20th verses : 

^'I cdll heofven and earth to record this day against 
you, that I have set before you life and death, bless- 
in ff and cursing: therefore choose life, that both 
thou and thy seed may live; 

''That thou mayest love the Lord thy God, and 
that thou mayest obey his voice, and that thou mayest 
cleave unto Him: for He is thy life, and the length 
of thy days; that thou mayest dw^ell in the land which 
the Lord smare unto thy fathers, to Abraham, to 
Isaac and to Jacob, to give them/^ 

My text is almost wholly included in the expres- 
sion, 

'Therefore choose life!" 

In the last sixty years it has been an almost an- 
nual occurrence with me to be present at some com- 
mencement exercises, and in the last forty years 

there has hardly been a year, that I have not been 

144 



''Graduation Thoughts'' 145 

present at some college, university or school anni- 
versary in connection with the baccalaureate address. 
Yet, in graduations from university or college, there 
is not such opportunity to say the most important 
things that should be said to mankind, as there is 
at the graduation from the high school. 

We welcome these young men and professors to- 
day with a feeling of responsibility, a feeling that 
it is an especially opportune moment. It is a psycho- 
logical moment in the lives of these young men, in 
which we may all learn a great Gospel lesson. 

Usually at the end of the high-school term, the 
greatest question before every graduate is, ''What 
shall I do in life?" There is no place in life where 
young men and women come so immediately face to 
face with the all-important question, "'What shall I 
do with my talents? What profession shall I take 
up? What business shall I enter? What occupa- 
tion will be most prosperous for me? What will 
bring me the most happiness in life? What will give 
me the greatest opportunity to make others happy? 
What will give me the greatest opportunity for the 
service of the living God? As the life's calling?" 

In order to consider the question from the Gos- 
pel standpoint, we need to consider our limitations. 
It is usual for mankind to look only on one side of a 
question, so that if it has three sides they see only 
one- third of it. It is usual for a man to say, 'T can 



146 Sermons for Great Days 

make my way; for other men are self-made." "In- 
deed all men are self-made who succeed; I can be 
a self-made man/' looking only at what he can do 
himself. Others look entirely at their environment 
and they say, ''I am so situated that I cannot be 
this, that or the other,'' and many of them decide 
they cannot be anything or do anything. Then there 
is another side, which is a man's inheritance. *T am 
what I have inherited and cannot expect to be any- 
thing else/' Therefore to these young men this 
morning, as to all who listen, I come bringing an old 
man's advice. 

The first thing I desire to mention is your limi- 
tations. You did not choose your parents, and in 
many cases you think you could have done better if 
you had. You did not choose your home or your 
country, and many of you wish you had had an op- 
portunity to have chosen the country in which you 
were born. You could not do that. That is a limita- 
tion beyond which you could not go. You have 
inherited from your parents certain traits of charac- 
ter coming down through generation after genera- 
tion and you are not responsible for that. You had 
no choice in the matter. Neither God nor man holds 
you responsible for traits of character you inherited 
which are beyond your control. Many of you are so 
situated. You did not choose the world in which to 
be born. If you had been consulted you might have 



''Graduation Thoughts'' 147 

chosen Mars or Uranus or some distant constellation 
of the universe; you might have chosen some other 
world to be born in, and I have seen a great many 
people who would have chosen some other universe 
if they had had their choice. But that was beyond 
them. We cannot hope either to be born on Mars 
or Alcyone. We would choose, I say, our native 
country. Think how many foreigners sing ''My 
country, 'tis of thee I sing,'' and yet they are singing 
of America; when their own native country is far 
away. It is an inconsistency they often wish they 
could have avoided. But it was a condition we 
could not change. It was fixed, eternal. We can- 
not hope to change that. Hence it is useless to 
kick against the pricks and try to overcome that 
which is altogether beyond our power. 

We wish we had inherited different bodies. Our 
bodies may be weak in many ways. We wish that 
our parents had so lived, or had been of such a class 
as to have imparted to us the physical power of 
endurance. How many young men would like to be 
soldiers, like these who are here before us this morn- 
ing in their uniforms to-day. They, too, want to 
be soldiers, yearning to be warriors, but the gov- 
ernment says ''Your eyes are weak'' or "your heart 
is weak and you would be more of a hindrance to 
the government than you would be a help.'' So many 
a young man regrets the inheritance of his body. 



148 Sermons for Great Days 

But he IS in the limitations of that body. How often 
we see men of a remarkable memory, and I often 
have seen men with such memories and I have said, 
'^I wish I had a memory like that, or that genius for 
definite things which led them to choose what they 
should do in life, and who have gifts that you and 
I have not." The man who is going to succeed in 
life must not over-estimate himself. He must not 
think that he can be a carpenter when he is unfitted 
for that calling; he must not think that he can be a 
teacher or even a soldier when he is unfitted for it. 
He must do the thing for which he is naturally fitted, 
and consequently you must examine yourselves with 
the greatest care. Find out what you are fitted for. 
Don't over-estimate yourself, which is the greatest 
danger, but study yourself, and remember, however 
unfortunate you may be, you are obliged to live 
with yourself. You are your own most intimate 
companion; you are your nearest companion; you 
are your nearest company; you are your own ad- 
viser; you live with your own self, young man! Do 
you not pity some young men who have to live with 
themselves? Of all things that attract the sympathy 
of the sincere mind, that is perhaps the keenest of 
them all! When you think of their disagreeable, 
inherited bad traits of character having certain defi- 
nite weakness of mind, and then remember that 
they have to live with themselves night and day. 



''Graduation Thoughts'' 149 

never getting away from their own society, and 
that '^every person is known by the company he 
keeps," you cannot escape a feehng of hearty sym- 
pathy. Such a person is certainly the best repre- 
sentative of that old proverb. We must remember 
that we cannot be some one else. We have a soul ; an 
independent identity, a personal spirit; something 
inside of the body; something eternal, unchangeable, 
a human soul ! We have that, and it is our own 
soul. We have not some one else's soul. We have 
temptations to sin that other people do not have. 
Other people seem to go through the world without 
having any trouble; seem to have no great tempta- 
tions to bear. Yet we cannot change it. 

We cannot change our environment. We are born 
of a certain race and associated with them. We 
cannot expect to be anything else. A man is born 
a Jew and he is with the Hebrew people and he has 
certain tendencies of that racial life; others may 
have been born in Ireland with Irish associations, 
another may be born in England or in Italy, and 
each one is in that environment in spite of himself. 
It might not have been what one would have chosen. 
You have been to one of the best schools in the 
United States, and you have been associated there 
with kindred spirits of young men of your kind, of 
your grade of thinking, of your environment, and 
you need not expect to change that environment. 



150 Sermons for Great Days 

Consequently, you must take an inventory, if you are 
going to choose now what you are going to be. This 
is your day for doing it! This is your day to shape 
your course so as to avoid weakness ; so as to avoid 
the dangers that specially assail you ; this is your day, 
to avail yourself of every possible advantage which 
your genius or makeup have given you. You have 
special gifts of mind, every one of you. You may 
say, 'T am not a genius," but you are. No two young 
men are alike. God never made two men just alike. 
Every single young man in this graduating class has 
some one definite gift of mind no one else has, and if 
he uses that to the best advantage he has an open 
road. It is the open door for every young man who 
takes an inventory of his own life. You must take 
an inventory of what capital you have; of what 
money you save, although that is of the least im- 
portance. You must take account of what family 
influence you have; you must take account of the 
number of friends you have. A young man who 
goes to school or college, surrounds himself with a 
great many friends or should do so. A person who 
belongs to a church like this should have at least a 
thousand personal friends. The church gives him 
the opportunity of making them, and they are capi- 
tal beyond valuation. They are worth far more than 
money, and the more you use them rightly, the hap- 



''Graduation Thoughts'' 151 

pier they will be, and you will be of the more use 
to them. 

You are to take account of God's laws which are 
in the universe, and be careful that you do not run 
against those eternal, ongoing laws which you can- 
not change. God has set down certain great moral 
and religious laws, which are fixed, eternal, and woe 
unto the man who throws himself against them. So 
you must take account of stock, and you must use 
nature's forces. The great river runs down the 
valley, and if you put your boat in that river you 
will be crushed upon the rocks, and you know it, 
but if you use your engineering powers and build up 
a great dam and hold back the forces of the river, 
and turn it into a single stream and put it at work, 
it does the work of a thousand men, and it serves 
you faithfully day by day. You can use God's laws ; 
you can use His forces; you can turn them in for 
yourself and they will be your capital. If we will 
study our natural tendencies carefully, we will be 
able to decide what is best to be done. 

O! this is an immortal moment for you, young 
man ! You may have come to church as a matter of 
form; you may have come to church because you 
were invited ; you may have come to church, perhaps, 
because it is usual to do these things at the end of 
the graduating term. But you are nevertheless here 
in the Providence of God. You are here for a defi- 



152 Sermons for Great Days 

nite purpose and you are here to be called upon by 
your God to decide what you will do for yourself. 
Because while we cannot change many of our en- 
vironments, we have a certain liberty; we have 
a certain line put like a circle around us, in which we 
have absolute choice, and Joshua said to the men of 
Israel, ''Choose ye this day whom ye will serve." 
So in every man's life there is the power to choose 
within certain lines, and within those limits he can 
so decide as to make life a great success. 

The wise way to decide how to be the most suc- 
cessful is to learn what the world needs. What does 
the world need in business ; what does the world need 
in agriculture ; what does the world need in the pro- 
fessions ; what does the world need in art, in music, 
in religion? Decide what is the most needed thing 
and put your self in the place where you will be most 
needed. Look around you and see what men like 
you can best do, and then decide where such a man 
can best invest his life ; so that you may study hu- 
man nature; so that you may study commerce, so 
that you may study business, philosophy, in order 
to find where a man with your peculiar makeup can 
best invest himself to the greatest prof t both for 
himself and others. For he who seeks the Kingdom 
of God first, helps his fellowmen the most, and is 
always doing the most for himself. All those things 
will be taken care of. Consequently invest yourself 



'^Graduation Thoughts'' 153 

where you are most needed. You are called of God, 
every one of you, no matter to what denomination 
you may belong, no matter what your family con- 
nections, or your life or your race, you are called 
to God, and you must decide where that call leads 
you. To be called of God is to be called to the serv- 
ice of one's fellowmen, to be called of God is to be 
urged to do something that you can do, and to do 
something you can do best; consequently all our 
study exhorts us to hear the voice of God so dis- 
tinctly that we will know for certain. You may 
feel an inclination toward a profession, and it may 
be the voice of God calling you, and yet the voice 
of conscience, the voices of nature and environment 
and the needs of all mankind must enter into the 
call, and all those voices must harmonize into one 
great and grand anthem calling you into the service 
of your God. , 

Let me say when you make these choices choose 
religion! It is an old-fashioned term; you have 
heard it very often; over and over again, but it is 
new to every one who starts in life, and it is new 
to you who are here this morning, and remember 
that however much money you may make in gam- 
bling, or in underhand investments, the laws of God 
are fixed. Sin may be hidden for a while, but some- 
where, sometime your sin will find you out, and a 
departure from the laws of God, from the dictates 



154 Sermons for Great Days 

of your own conscience, will bring you retribution, 
as sure as the night follows the day. Remember 
that, and consequently never enter into any un- 
righteous calling. 

One day there was a steamer went out from New 
York, one of the greatest steamers that ever came 
across the ocean. I traveled upon it twice, and the 
luxuries of that steamer were greater than that of 
any palace. It was filled with passengers, men, 
women and children, and before it reached the shores 
of England it was sunk by an assassinating subma- 
rine, that German assassinating dagger of the sea! 
and the ship went down, and the waves were filled 
with the dying and the drowning, and from this 
church there went one of the sweetest little families 
that ever walked the earth. It was a great, great 
sin. It was a great, great wickedness! It was a 
national crime, thus to attack the innocent, the un- 
defended, the weak, the women and children and the 
peaceable citizens. It was a great, national crime! 
Now, friends, what do you see? 

Riding through the country as I do, I see miles 
and miles of wheat raised because the Lusitania was 
sunk, 

I go through the country and I see the smoke of 
many chimneys; where before there was only an 
arid plain, there is now a great city of 50,000 or 
100,000 inhabitants reared almost in a day, and they 



''Graduation Thoughts'' 155 

are manufacturing night and day, because the Lusi- 
tania was sunk. 

We see men going without food ; without proper 
clothing; we see men everywhere stopping at noon- 
day, praying that we may be victorious, and every- 
where there is a spirit of fraternity, a determined 
spirit to help the weak and oppressed nations — ^why ? 
Because the Lusitania was sunk. 

You go across the sea and there the boys are going 
ashore, a hundred thousand a week, and they are 
over there to-day in the camps and in the trenches, 
because the Lusitania was sunk. 

Two or three months ago Germany stood in such 
place of power that notwithstanding her suffering 
and hunger, she was sure to have won the World 
War if she had only been opposed by the English 
and the French. These nations were so worn out 
and so hungry themselves that they could not hope 
to defeat that great power and the war machinery 
which it had taken over fifty years to build up. The 
war would undoubtedly have been won by Germany, 
but the Lusitania was sunk, A great national crime 
was done. Consequently now millions of soldiers 
seem to be coming upon the shores rising from the 
sea, like some great phantom before Germany, and 
this makes it absolutely certain to any reasonable 
mind that Germany must soon seek for peace, and 
humbly seek for any kind of terms, that will let her 



156 Sermons for Great Days 

even have her own territory, beccmse the Ltisitania 
was sunk, 

O! no nation and no individual can hurl a sin 
without its coming back again in after time. The sin 
of the raids of the air and of the assassin submarines 
is coming back to the German nation now. The 
hand of God is used as an instrument to punish that 
nation for its fearful sins ; and no sin was greater in 
the history of the world in all its wars than the sink- 
ing of the Lusitania. Now every gun that is fired 
will send its shells to kill the Germans and send 
mourning into their homes. They say, and this is 
conceded to be a very conservative estimate, that 
300,000 Germans were killed during the last four 
weeks. Think of 300,000 homes made dark and 
black and sad for fifty years to come, because the 
Lusitania was sunk. No sin can ever be committed 
by individuals or by a nation but what its retribu- 
tion will come, and hence I urge you, I warn you 
that while you are choosing your life's profession, 

"Choose life, that thou and thy seed may live!" 

BENEDICTION 

O Lord! Let the benediction of Thy care and 
grace come upon our soldiers and sailors and nurses 
wherever they are. May Thy benediction come 
upon our nation, and give us a victory that will 
bring a permanent peace and the brotherhood of all 



''Graduation Thoughts'' 157 

mankind. Let Thy benedictions come upon the 
Philadelphia high school represented here, and may- 
each member graduating come under Thine especial 
care. Let the benedictions of Thy love abide with 
us all evermore. Amen. 



XI 
The American Flag 

(the acts XXII : 28) 

OUR Heavenly Father ! we pray Thee this morn- 
ing for the spirit which will guide our peti- 
tions so that we may pray in accord with the rules 
Thou hast laid down. 

We pray Thee that Thou wilt take our nation 
under Thine especial care ; we pray Thee that Thou 
wilt guide all of our affairs these important days, 
and that Thou wilt hinder anything that defeats the 
progress of righteousness and advance everything 
that tends toward good. 

We know that our nation has sinned and fallen 
far short of Thy glory. We know that our people 
have gone into error, and wickedness, and that they 
have sinned. We know that we all deserve punish- 
ment from Thee. We knaw that we all need dis- 
cipline from Thee. But O Lord we come to Thee 
asking Thee to forgive us as individuals and as a 
nation, and permit us to begin life anew under these 
circumstances, so that there will be no more mis- 
takes made. 

158 



The American Flag 159 

We pray that Thou wilt at this time come into the 
hearts of the people of this land, and be very close 
to them in this time of stress and excitement. Hold 
ever before them the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ, 
the Prince of Peace. 

We pray Thee that Thou wilt keep our nation in 
a devout spirit, while determined to do its duty, yet 
ever preferring peace to war — ^always desiring those 
things that make for peace. 

We pray that no opportunity shall pass in which 
peace might be secured without effort being strongly 
and sincerely made to secure it. We pray Thee that 
this war may close, and that it may be closed with 
the idea in the minds of men that patriotism is the 
patriotism of God; that it is the patriotism of the 
world; that it is the patriotism of humanity. 

We pray Thee that all who worship Thee may 
keep close to the teachings of Thy Word ; that they 
may realize that Christ is for all humanity. Help 
us to believe that humanity is larger than the United 
States ; help us to realize that the whole world family 
is far more important than our local interests. Help 
us to look higher even than that — to recognize Thee 
as the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords — the 
only Ruler, O God ! may our people never lose sight 
of that. 

We pray Thee that this war, now upon us, may 
not take our people into savagery; that it may not 



l6o Sermons for Great Days 

take out of their hearts and lives the Christian prin- 
ciples given of Christ. We pray Thee that the Sab- 
bath Day may still be respected ; we pray Thee that 
the Bible may have free course in the hearts of the 
soldiers, and the sailors, and the home, and the 
Church. We pray Thee that the great principles of 
human liberty may prevail still. 

O Lord ! we pray Thee that the necessity for mili- 
tary life may not bring our people into harmony with 
autocracy, and monarchy, and tyranny, and dictator- 
ship. We pray Thee that there may be maintained 
in our nation individual liberty of conscience, and 
as far as possible the individual liberty of every per- 
son's actions, and may the world see that we are still 
maintaining a pure and upright democracy, and be 
saved by the power of our example. 

We ask that over the whole world there may soon 
come a time when all the people shall be brothers. 
We pray for the German people, and ask that soon 
they may be made to clearly understand that Christ 
is higher than Germany ; we pray Thee that they may 
soon see that the Gospel applies as much to the world 
as it does to Germany, and we pray Thee that the 
same teachings may go to every other nation en- 
gaged in the war, and may all learn that our obliga- 
tion to Thee is above every other obligation, and may 
America be noted, the world around, as being com- 
posed of sincere Christian men who believe in God, 



The American Flag i6l 

and who believe His laws are above all other laws, 
and whose service is above every other service. 
Lord, keep Thy Kingship and Thy power ever in 
front! 

Hear our petition this morning for Thy blessing 
to be upon those who are serving our country. Hear 
us as we pray for Thy protecting care to be around 
our sailors and soldiers. Lord, guide them safely to 
victory. 

Hear us as we pray for the suffering, and the 
sick, and those who are in great sorrow. Hear all 
our petitions, not for our much speaking, for Thou 
canst see our minds and read our thoughts — we ask 
all in the Name of Thy Son, the Lord Jesus Christ. 
Amen. 

The text of to-night, about which I will speak a 
few minutes, is found in the 22d Chapter of Acts : 

^^And the chief captain ansmered, with a great 
sum I obtained this freedom. But Paul said, 'I was 
horn free! " 

The first incident of childhood I can remember, 
and which I recall to-night, is that of frequent visits 
made to an old captain's home, who had served 
through the Revolutionary War. The old man 
would shoulder his crutch, march up and down the 
old New England kitchen, and tell us of the days 
of Bunker Hill, or Saratoga, or of Yorktown. 



i62 Sermons for Great Days 

When we tried to question him, as little children 
would do, he would turn, and, with a fierce look of 
a war-god who would annihilate his little audience, 
exclaim, ''What do you know about war ? You were 
not born." The old man was proud of his gray hair, 
proud of the wounds he had received, proud of his 
crutches, proud of his pension. Old Captain Pome- 
roy was the valient hero of the whole neighborhood. 
What had we children to do with the War of the 
Revolution ! We were not born ! 

They who fought in the Revolution bought our 
liberty with a great sum. They gave oh, so much 
for that which we now enjoy! It is unnecessary, 
before a reading and studious audience like this, for 
me to restate the great debts which cannot be cal- 
culated when we remind you how the forefathers 
served us, suffered for us, and died for us in the 
Revolution. 

We have inherited the rich result of their deeds. 
We are enjoying without cost that which they pur- 
chased with blood. We are conscious of that. At 
the time when I was a small boy, we saw the genera- 
tion of the Revolution pass over the border into 
the eternal beyond. But during the generation in 
which those soldiers lived, and those statesmen who 
had seen the Revoutionary days, wielded their power 
and wrought their patriotism into our form of gov- 
ernment, they preserved carefully the principles for 



The American Flag 163 

which they fought, and for which many of their 
comrades died. 

Through their generation our hberty was safe. 
They had bought it with a great sum; they appre- 
ciated what it cost, and departure from the principles 
of Hberty, of equahty on the part of our government, 
and any attempt to use the flag of our nation to pro- 
tect any person in any unrighteous undertaking, was 
immediately condemned by public sentiment by those 
who had seen war in its ravages. They whose homes 
had been burned, whose fields had been devastated, 
whose children had been torn on the field of battle, 
whose homes had been so desolate through the sad 
absence of father or brother, knew what it cost to 
win our hberty. While they lived, a firm hand was 
held upon every essential principle. 

But we inherited without cost what they left us. 
The act of independence passed in this city was the 
declaration of brave men, who knew, as Franklin 
said, that they ''must hang together or hang sep- 
arately." They were brave men. We have said, 
perhaps, enough for this discussion concerning their 
bravery, their costly sacrifice. 

The Declaration of Independence was signed on 
the Fourth of July, but the Act of Separation was 
passed by the Continental Congress on the second of 
July, in this, our patriotic city. We look back and 
find it was made possible by what God had done for 



164 Sermons for Great Days 

this continent in the previous years. God had sent 
to Massachusetts the Pilgrim Fathers. He had sent 
to Rhode Island Roger Williams. God sent to 
Maryland Lord Baltimore. God sent to South Caro- 
line Oglethorpe. He had sent John Wesley. He had 
sent the great pioneer martyrs, who gave their lives 
that Christianity might have a place of freedom in 
this fair land. 

When this nation was born in yonder hall, it was 
but the outcome, the concrete result, of a previous 
religious training. A nation founded upon the Bible, 
the Rock Jesus Christ, came into existence, and those 
Christian principles given by the love of God, in the 
Bible teachings were maintained through the first 
generation of our nation's existence. 

We look back with surprise upon what so few 
people — only three millions, accomplished. But 
when you of my age came upon this world we came 
like Paul; we were born into this noble coiidition. 
We inherited what our forefathers had left to us. 
We could not say, with our proud Roman captain, 
"I bought this freedom with a great price." We 
could not say we had engaged in any long war, or 
that we gave our sons or husbands; we could not 
say that we risked all that we might be free and our 
children might enjoy liberty. But we could say with 
Paul, "I was born free." 

To be able to say, "I was bom free" and appre- 



The American Flag 165 

ciate the inheritance, was something so remarkable 
that it placed Paul even above the Roman centurion, 
for he who inherits privileges usually values them 
at the least. Such was the case from 1840 to i860. 
From 1840 to i860, the generation that was born 
into this glorious inheritance forgot what it cost. 
They had inherited it in the second generation only, 
and did not appreciate its value, just as a young man 
or woman now inherits a great fortune. They know 
not how hard the father or mother worked, or how 
intently they saved or sacrificed to get together that 
property, and they spend it uselessly or in riotous liv- 
ing. We find that from 1840 to i860 this nation 
went on rioting with its inheritance, forgot its value, 
and increased more and more its tendency toward 
slavery, until the stars and stripes, under a new gen- 
eration, represented a nation that enslaved four mil- 
lion of people, and the nation, by its legislative acts, 
by its armies, by its presidency, had forgotten the 
Declaration of Independence, which said that all 
mankind are born free and endowed with certain in- 
alienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of 
happiness. 

What a contradiction it was — the flag of the free 
in i860! Then we had to fight over again the bat- 
tle of 1776. We were compelled to make the flag 
what our forefathers claimed it must be, namely, the 
flag of the free. We were obliged to make great 



l66 Sermons for Great Days 

sacrifices then, and as I look back through the years 
I see the blue lines of regiments hurrying into battle. 
I hear them tramping on now. I can see the awful 
contest, I hear the thunder strokes of the cannon, 
the hiss of the bullets. I see the flash of the swords 
and bayonets ; see the ground covered with the dead ; 
hear the groans, and again we carry off the battle- 
fields during the long night, the suffering and dying. 
O ! liberty costs a great sum. 

Then 1865 came, and the million of men — North 
and South — who returned to their homes once more 
could all say, "This is the flag of the free, and by 
a good sum we have purchased this freedom.'' Then 
for a score of years this land was held to freedom. 
From i860 to 1880 this land, through the influence 
of the soldiers of the nation, was held strictly ac- 
countable for every unpatriotic act, and steadily and 
surely liberty held up her light before the world, 
supported on every side with the hands that had 
given something for their freedom, and were ready 
to give much more. 

Millions of men were scattered over this land who 
had faced cannon, who had felt its smoke in their 
eyes, and heard the hiss of its shot in their ears, or 
who had fallen and lain bleeding on the battlefield. 
Such men had purchased their freedom and pur- 
chased it with a great price. They understood its 
value and the flag was the flag of the free. 



The American Flag 167 

It was during that score of years, following 1865, 
that this nation had more influence over the other 
nations of the earth than throughout all its history. 
From 1865 to 1875, only ten years, it gave parts of 
its constitution to seventeen different nations, who, 
imitating our example of freedom, copied our law^s 
and adopted our institutions. During that twenty 
years Europe saw three of her great nations copying 
our form and advocating our ideas of liberty. Even 
the heathen in distant lands, and especially Japan, 
copied us in our example, our teachings, our schools, 
our voting system, our colleges, our academies, our 
science, our improvements. During that twenty 
years when men lived who had seen the cost of lib- 
erty and understood its value, this nation needed 
no army, no navy to win the respect of mankind. 
Then, if it uttered its fiat or expressed its opinion, 
the nations of Europe respected it. 

But a nation has arisen born into this liberty and 
being born into it, do they appreciate it as Paul did, 
or do they not? I find that the nation in the last 
thirty years has gradually been taken aside from the 
patriotic position it held in 1865, until now great 
dangers arise. I do not anticipate great losses. I 
am not one of those who look upon this nation in 
such a fearful exigency. It cannot go far back. But 
I am one of those among the old men of the genera- 
tion now left behind, who cannot fail to warn you 



l68 Sermons for Great Days 

that the history of the past is likely to be repeated. 
If it is repeated, there will come to this generation 
the time when your freedom will again cost you 
much. 

We come to this generation which has come into 
that power and say that we have the old flag with 
us. We have seen it in battle; we have seen it go 
down before a brave foe ; we have seen it raised by 
brave heroes, who fell in lifting that flag again and 
again. The older we grow the more awful it seems, 
and the closer becomes the comradeship of the Grand 
Army of the Republic. We have seen it, we know 
its cost. 

We cannot impress it upon this generation as we 
would ; but we commit the flag to you. It represents 
what our forefathers fought for in the Revolution; 
it represents the bloody feet of Valley Forge; it rep- 
resents the great sacrifices of Washington ; it repre- 
sents the bravery of John Hancock and John Adams; 
it represents the oratory of Patrick Henry and Daniel 
Webster; it represents the grand patriotism of Henry 
Wilson, of Douglas, of Lincoln, of Garrison and of 
Wendell Phillips. It represents all the oratory, all 
the patriotism, all the battles, all the fighting of 1861 
to 1865. It represents the graves of men and the 
tears of women. It means much to the soldier who 
fought for it. We commit it to your care, and we 



The American Flag 169 

ask you to remember that it represents ''personal 
liberty/* 

Do you think that in 1865 or in 1870 a mob could 
have burned at the stake a negro in Georgia? Do 
you think it could have been done while soldiers of 
the North and of the South — a million of them — 
still lived in this land ? But now you hear of it and 
forget it. The Indians who preceded us here, who 
burned their captives at the stake, resorted to no 
such hideous cruelty as now sometimes comes under 
this flag, untried and uncondemned in some of the 
States. 

O friends, we leave you this flag! But shall it 
go on meaning that law shall not be respected, or 
shall every man, whether he be black or white, be al- 
lowed an honest trial, and have the right to defend 
his innocence, and shall every man be condemned 
who doth wrong? Shall savages or true men have 
the care of womanhood committed to them? Shall 
that be its future? We have seen the day when the 
flag meant that no man, white or black, could be 
condemned without an honest trial. We have seen 
it. Will you see it again ? Will you, who have taken 
this flag from us, carry it on in that old way, and 
bravely declare that wherever that flag flies every 
man shall have an honest trial, and the mandates 
of the law shall be promptly executed? 

This flag means a right to free organization. But 



1 70 Sermons for Great Days 

we see it shelter now great combinations that are 
injurious to our interests. We see great trusts 
formed now, which, by the fearful force of capital, 
are taking your liberty from you and from your 
children, and raising up a moneyed aristocracy that 
would rule the land instead of the people. Instead of 
a government of the people, by the people and for 
the people, it is in danger of becoming a government 
of the few. , 

Four hundred and eighty families own forty-one 
per cent, of all the property in this land now, and if 
all those families chose to combine, with their great 
money power, they could erect an aristocracy that 
would rule this land. This land could become an 
empire, even here where our children enjoy this 
liberty! Let us begin to appreciate this inheritance. 
If it costs us blood ; if it costs us all the terrible sacri- 
fices of a war of 1776, or 1812, or 1861, there will be 
no danger from these trusts. But a generation has 
been born into this condition, and does not yet appre- 
ciate what it cost. 

We believe that a man, or a set of men, has the 
right, under our constitution and our liberty, to or- 
ganize with their capital. All trusts are not bad. 
Many trusts are for the good of the people, and 
all trusts ought to be for the good of the people. 
The laws of the land ought also to protect the liberty 
of the individual to such an extent that no combina- 



The American Flag 171 

tions could deprive him of his honest rights. And 
that day must come, but it may cost you much. It 
will cost you blood, cost you loss of treasure, cost 
you perhaps loss of liberty unless you appreciate 
what the flag means. 

The flag means that all men shall have the right to 
organize but never the right to so combine as to 
deprive any individual of his natural rights. We are 
accusing the trusts a great deal more than we ought. 
I believe that we ought to sustain some of them, as 
I cannot see how our liberty or prosperity can be pre- 
served without them. 

The greatest trust on earth is the association of 
working men. There is no trust so great as these 
organizations of working men. I would not have 
the right taken away from them. The right to com- 
bine their capital and their labor into one great trust 
should not be taken away. If you take it away from 
the working men, you must take it away from the 
incorporated companies or take it away from the 
capitalists. But the flag represents the theory that 
every individual under its folds has an equal right 
to an opportunity to succeed in life. We will need 
now to utter these principles again to the world, 
that men shall not combine to enslave their fellow- 
men, whether it be in an autocracy or in large trusts 
of capital, or trusts of labor organizations, for the 
principles apply fully to them all. 



172 Sermons for Great Days 

Will the next Fourth of July be celebrated by the 
mere lighting of fire crackers or exhibition of games, 
entirely forgetful that on this day the nation was 
born, and ignoring the importance of teaching again 
the principles of liberty and righteousness accord- 
ing to the commandment of God. 

In a large part of this land the Fourth of July 
has become only a holiday for sports ; and when they 
have finished the day, and if they are catechized con- 
cerning the Declaration of Independence or the Con- 
stitution of the United States, or what the Fourth of 
July stands for, they will only be able to answer you 
in terms of baseball. You cannot to-day expect all 
of these people, who thus celebrate the Fourth of 
July to rightly value what they have inherited. But 
God asks us now to buy our freedom with a great 
sum. 

The flag represents universal peace among the 
nations. It is not a war flag. It means something 
better than war. Our flag does not mean war. It 
never did mean destruction. It has meant a building 
up always. This flag never represented the savagery 
of war. Any man can tear down. The devil de- 
lights in destruction. Any man can girdle a tree 
that has seen a slow growth of a century. Any man 
can with a match bum down a building that has 
cost a million of dollars. It takes a grand, noble 
and great nation to rise and build up and make beau- 



The American Flag 173 

tiful the architecture of the world, and to make 
great souls of men, and to guide them toward 
heayen. That is what the flag means. 

This flag does stand for a permanent universal 
peace, for upbuilding, for fraternity all over the 
earth. Will it stand so to those who have inherited 
it? Will it always mean that those states which 
agreed to form a nation in 1780, made a compact 
for all time, and will it mean that all states who join 
our national family must do so as volunteers ? 

This flag means sympathy always with the op- 
pressed. I have often thought of that night when 
the President in 1848 arose from his bed on receiv- 
ing a despatch from Daniel Manin, at Venice, and 
ordered that recognition of independence of the 
Venician Republic should be sent on the very next 
ship to the little Republic approving their attempt 
to make themselves free from the tyranny of Aus- 
tria. That was true patriotism. That represented 
what the people mean that there is no nation on 
earth so low, so poor or so small, but that if it be 
groveling under hard tyranny it has the sym- 
pathy of the hearts of all our people. There is not 
a scene of carnage in Armenia but what awakens a 
throb of sympathy in the United States, and our flag 
is a protest against the tyranny of the Turkish gov- 
ernment. 

There is not a case of slavery in Africa, not a 



174 Sermons for Great Days 

hideous murder in South America, but what has the 
moral protest of the hnes upon our flag, and has 
the condemnation of the stars that shine in its blue. 
The flag means sympathy with the oppressed where- 
ever they may be, and under the light this land is 
an asylum for the oppressed. 

Not an Armenian finds his way from the shores 
of Palestine but should be welcomed from the heart 
of the people to the shores of America. There is 
not a person oppressed in Russia among the Jewish 
people, but what finds a hearty welcome when he 
reaches our shores. We are sometimes burdened 
by the incoming of some classes, but the hearts of 
the American people have been opened all the years 
to the incoming of the oppressed of every land. 
This is still the land of the free. 

Whenever a foot touches this shore it is free and 
it is welcomed. Whoever cometh to this land to 
make his home, whoever cometh here to escape from 
tyranny, whoever cometh here to grow more intelli- 
gent or more moral, or to love God better, is wel- 
come. That is what the flag means — what it has 
meant through the years. But in these later days 
there had grown up a selfish spirit in the generation 
that has inherited what cost the fathers so much, 
and a tendency was seen to shut out by law the poor 
and suffering people who would find a home of rest 
in our beloved land. But the flag means an open 



The American Flag 175 

welcome. Make it mean so in future years. Pay 
the price. 

The flag means that this is the land of the fully 
free — every person free — each one having the exer- 
cise of his natural rights. O, ye men who have inher- 
ited all this priceless treasure, would you extend it 
for the good of your fellowmen! Won't you be sure 
that there arises no power, whether it be the money 
power or political power, that shall enslave our 
people; that shall make the many serve the few? 
Won't you preserve this government in these dan- 
gerous days so that the people themselves still shall 
rule? Won't you beware of political combinations 
that give any one man permanent power over thou- 
sands of people? Won't you beware of any com- 
bination of capital that makes one man a king over 
thousands in this land? Won't you beware of aiiy 
combination that gives states or cities or towns au- 
thoritj to control the individuals by some corporate 
power? Won't you beware that all people, white or 
black, rich or poor, shall all be equal before the law? 
Let us live the character at home we would fight for 
in the field. 

It is necessary that you preserve your judiciary 
with the greatest care. It is necessary to see that 
your laws are enforced with precision. It is neces- 
sary that the criminal is ever condemned and that 
the innocent ever goes free. It is necessary to help 



176 Sermons for Great Days 

the poor that they may have an equal chance with the 
rich. 

A person born in this land in late years without 
money has been at a disadvantage where the laws of 
the state and the people did not extend a helping 
hand to him as a child, and give him an opportunity 
to obtain an education, an opportunity to secure a 
trade, or an opportunity to be independent of that 
condition which would place him in the chains of 
poverty. 

If you would still keep this the land of the free 
you must extend Christian principles. Don't shut 
the Bible out of your schools. Don't take the Bible 
out of your courts. Don't forget the Sabbath Day. 
Don't forget the Ten Commandments, for those 
principles God has taught and Christianity has 
taught has made this country what it is. Carry 
these principles out for the sake of the price they cost 
in the days gone by, and value them so justly as to 
pay unhesitatingly another instalment on the great 
sum our peaceful homes, our equality and freedom 
are worth. May the God of nations accept the price 
w^e offer. 



XII 
Harvest Home 

(genesis I :i2) 

TO-NIGHT, as I appeal to the Sunday School 
scholars, I wish to preach seven sermons. 
First, upon the text, *'Each Seed After His Own 
Kind." I take in my hand two different articles, 
which I have picked up from this heap of harvest 
products. What kind of a seed do you suppose was 
planted to produce that tomato? Do you suppose 
that if you planted this egg-plant that the tomato 
would grow from it? If you planted an onion would 
it come up a cabbage? If you planted wheat would 
it come up rye? If you planted a pepper would it 
come up an apple tree ? So find another text, ''What- 
soever a man soweth that shall he also reap." If a 
boy or girl in life, should sow bad thoughts or sin- 
ful actions, such a boy or girl will reap what they 
sow. Whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also 
reap. That is my first sermon. 

My second sermon is drawn from this tree. Do 
you suppose that this tree in the field was all above 

ground? Here are some oak bushes. How much of 

177 



lyS Sermons for Great Days 

that tree do you suppose is under ground? More of 
it perhaps under ground than above ground. The 
roots are running far out underneath, further than 
the hmbs extend out into the air, although the roots 
do not extend as far down into the ground as the 
branches extend into the air. What is the reason 
for that? It evidently was God's intention when 
He arranged that a tree should grow, that it should 
derive its nourishment from the air and the ground, 
but mostly from the air, but the roots are placed 
down underneath. While they do serve a helpful 
purpose towards the sustenance of the tree, yet 
there is some other great design. Why do the roots 
run so far out under ground? Why are they made 
so strong, like iron cables in strength? It is be- 
cause somewhere, in the course of that tree's life, 
there are going to be storms; and when that wind 
comes from the mountains or the cyclone sweeps 
over the plains and strikes this tree it will stand firm 
if its roots run wide under ground. There is a 
boy here. He is a pretty good boy now, but the roots 
of his religious character have perhaps not been 
placed far enough under ground; he has not been 
planted deep enough in settled character so that when 
another boy comes along with some temptation he 
goes over with the storm or in the time of excitement 
or anger he falls. Many a man goes over because 
in his youth his character was not founded deep 



Harvest Home 179 

enough, strong enough and wide enough to hold him 
in place. 

Another thought also comes in connection with 
the tree: If I hang a weight upon this branch — take 
this sickle and hang it on this tree, and if this were 
a growing tree, that weight on that limb would, 
after a while, cause it to stay in that bent position, 
and when it grew up to be a great tree it would still 
bow like that. I remember an apple tree very dis- 
tinctly, that grew on the hillside back of our house, 
and whenever, as a boy, I came in from the harvest 
field, I would run along the top of the hill as fast 
as I could and swing from one of those branches, 
swinging away down the hill and bending the branch 
over every time. I was at the old farm last week 
and there is that tree bent over to the ground where 
I bent it when I was a boy. As the twig is bent so 
the tree is inclined, and if a boy or girl in youth 
contracts any bad habits those habits are very sure 
to remain to hinder them all through life. 

It is curious how we are bound down by habit. 
Every man finds himself doing things that he did 
when a boy, and somehow is not able to overcome 
those habits. I saw a minister the other day who 
was in the habit of thrusting both hands in his 
pockets when he was preaching. I asked him why 
it was and he said, "I am fighting that habit all the 
time; my wife and daughter call my attention to it 



l8o Sermons for Great Days 

and I have thought of having my pockets sewed up 
to prevent it. But I got into the habit when I was a 
boy and somehow cannot get out of it/' As that 
Httle habit afflicted him so there are habits that 
afflict all of us — habits contracted when we were 
young. When a boy falls into bad company and 
does those things in his youth that he will be sorry 
for when he is old he will drop into these bad habits 
without knowing it. 

I recall a minister who was a very good preacher. 
But one day I heard him swear. I felt shocked to 
hear a preacher of the gospel of Jesus Christ using 
profane language, and afterwards when I spoke to 
him about it he said, ^It was the first time that I 
have given way since I became a Christian. But that 
overcame me, I was so angry that I fell into the old 
habit before I could command myself.'' It is dan- 
gerous, even after you become a Christian — these 
habits will come out. 

I want to preach another sermon. I wonder if 
there are any heads of wheat here. When a tree 
or stalk bends because it is loaded with fruit it is a 
beautiful thing. How much would you give for a 
field of wheat whose stalks stood up straight like 
that? You would not give anything for it. Why 
is it that some people go around with their heads 
so high in the air, looking above the heads of their 
fellowmen. It is because there is nothing in their 



Harvest Home i8l 

heads. There is nothing there to hold the head 
down. When a head of wheat is heavy it bends over. 
When you see a man who is a thoroughly godly man, 
whose brain is skilled and who is a great genius, his 
head bends over. Not that he is round shouldered, 
but he is a modest man. When Jesus Christ spoke 
of the merit of humility when He taught us to re- 
member that God was over all and that we were 
weak and sinful, He taught us that great truth illus- 
trated by the wheat. As soon as religion enters into 
our hearts our heads will reverently bow. 

Now I have here a number of leaves. Those 
leaves are the lungs of the tree. Like men, they 
give out something and they take in something with 
every breath. They build up the tree and the tree 
is simply made up of the bark that has grown every 
year. There is a great tree in England that is more 
than three thousand years old. By boring into it 
they have found more than three thousand rings or 
layers of bark. So the great tree of to-day is only 
its past self covered by outer bark. Now the char- 
acter of a boy or girl is simply the accumulated ex- 
perience of the various years. Year by year we in- 
crease in a bad character or a good character. But 
as to these leaves — they are of great use. It is said 
that we could not live for more than nine minutes if 
it were not for trees, because the leaves give out the 
oxygen which is necessary for our life. They take 



1 82 Sermons for Great Days 

in the poisonous stuffs from the air and give out 
healthful oxygen. That is the reason why a forest 
is such a beautiful place, because there are so many 
leaves giving out oxygen. If you can get into a 
forest, where there are not to many decaying leaves, 
it is the healthiest place in the world. 

I have looked all around here since I have been 
on the platform and I cannot find a single weed. 
That is unnatural. A weed or two would have made 
this decoration seem more realistic. At least it would 
to every farmer's boy, like myself. My back has 
ached and my feet have smarted and I have worked 
until the perspiration has dropped from my forehead 
over these weeds. The weeds multiply faster than 
the grain. You plant a little grain of wheat and it 
multiplies thirty, sixty or a hundred fold — that is, 
you get back one hundred grains for every one you 
plant. But if you plant a sunflower, which is a 
dreadful weed in some places, it produces two thou- 
sand seeds for one. If you plant a thistle, that al- 
ways bears at least four thousand seeds. It is so 
easy to plant a weed and it is so easy for it to mul- 
tiply. It is so easy for us to plant an action that 
is wrong, it is so easy to sow a word that is bad. 
You see lots of boys who would rather use slang 
than decent language. You hear boys say "Gee," 
which is a cowardly way of saying ''J^^us.'* Yet 
they try, by such weak, little, contemptible methods^ 



Harvest Home 183 

to sneak behind swearing. Don't be a contemptible 
sneak and hide behind the bush, to throw stones. 
Bad words are so easy to use and good words are so 
commonplace, it would seem. Words and actions 
are like plants — bad actions are like the thistle but 
good actions are like the wheat. It is so much 
easier to tear down than to build up. The destroyers 
are frequent, the builders are rare. 

I have here an ear of corn. It had to be pro- 
tected by this husk while it was young. If it had 
not stayed in that husk it would never have been 
the perfect ear that it is to-day. And so the child 
in the home must be protected by mother's care 
and father's power and be kept in the shade. The 
child may say, 'T do not like to be kept at home and 
tied to my mother's apron strings and obey my 
father." But the boy who does not do so will never 
grow up into perfect manhood and form his charac- 
ter as he ought to form it. The home-nest is the 
place for the boy until the time comes for him to 
take his place in the world and do his own duty. 
Children who do not stay at home become blighted 
ears and covered with mildew. That is what happens 
to the corn if it is exposed to the air before the 
proper time. 

Then I come to my next sermon, and that is that 
this ear of corn can do a wonderful thing for you. 
Now you boys and girls go to school. Sup- 



184 Sermons for Great Days 

pose you take just one kernel of corn and plant 
it and it always produces a hundred fold? How 
long would it take to plant the whole of the arable 
land of the world with Indian corn from that one 
kernel? It would take only five years. And if 
every Christian would sow a kernel of good deeds 
how long would it take to win the world to Christ? 
If every Christian in this church or Sunday School 
were to sow one good deed or bring one soul to 
Christ each year and those thus brought to Christ 
were to do likewise, it would not be twenty-five years 
before the whole world would be Christian. What a 
lesson is taught us by the corn when we think that 
in five years, from one single grain we could cover 
the earth with Indian corn. 

Do you know that all the fruits were once wild? 
Do you know that the tomato was called a ground 
persimmon; that it was very puckery and would 
draw your mouth all up so that you could hardly get 
your lead pencil in? The great-great grandfather 
of the pepper was a little weedy thistle that grew in 
the southern part of India. The celery you eat was 
so poisonous that a single stalk of it would have 
killed any man only a very few years ago. Do you 
know what was the great, great, great grandfather 
of the pear? If you will go into the mountains 
you will see the mountain ash, having red berries 
on it, not larger than a pea. It is a pretty tree, but 



Harvest Home 185 

if you ever tasted those berries you would not call 
it a luscious tree. I remember once having been de- 
ceived by a man who told me they were currants. I 
took a handful and put them into my mouth at once 
and spit them oat very quickly. Yet that bitter red 
berry is the great grandfather of the Bartlett pear. 
Perhaps some of you children may have heard of 
Burbank, who has been taking the great cacti of 
the desert and grafting them so as to change their 
nature, and they have become luscious food for the 
animals. I know that on our farm there grew a 
thorn bush. Well do I remember its prickles. But 
one day a man came from Boston and he grafted a 
pear twig on that thorn bush and last summer I 
walked over to the meadow and that bush was full 
of pears. The fruit tree had covered the thorn tree 
altogether. All our grains have come from some- 
thing wild in the past. Even the carrots and the 
potatoes were once wild. Every fruit and vegetable 
on this platform has come from wild ancestors. Just 
as the boys and girls start in life wild. I have seen 
wild boys, and some of them live not very far from 
here. I have seen wild girls, and some of them live 
in this neighborhood. Indeed, all boys would be 
wild Indians or worse if they were not cultivated 
and cared for and taught. Every child must have a 
character grafted .into it — ^must have Christ's char- 



1 86 Sermons for Great Days 

acter added In order to have a character worthy of 
heaven. The pear tree and the apple tree are no more 
the product of the original thorn than is the Chris- 
tian the product of the original vicious and sinful 
nature with which he is bom. 

All that is worth having cost something in care; 
and these boys and girls have had the sufferings of 
father and mother, and have been an expense to 
their parents and source of great anxiety and care. 
If they have good and noble characters to-day they 
should remember that it is the result of watching 
and careful prayer and labor of father and mother. 
The boy or girl who does not appreciate the sacri- 
fices of parents has not approached the line of a 
Christian character. I would like these boys and 
girls to go to their homes from this anniversary with 
the thought in their minds, "I am going to be a 
Christian, I am going to try and serve Christ, and 
I will begin by being obedient to my father and 
mother. 

Then, think how all the leaves must die in order 
to live. If you planted a diamond or an emerald, 
would it grow? If you planted a stone, would it 
grow? Everything that lives must die to live on. 
Nothing which cannot die can ever live. Now 
this corn is the product of corn that is dead — corn 
that died in the ground and reproduced itself in this, 



Harvest Home 187 

the resurrection. Every kind of fruit tree, every 
sort of grain has gone continually through that death 
and resurrection period. Therefore, remember 
this, that every one must die in order to live again. 
A stone cannot die and therefore it does not rise to 
a new life. A man cannot live again unless he dies. 
So that my lesson is that every fruit around us here 
is an assurance of the resurrection. Some previous 
fruit died that this might live; my ancestors died 
that I might live, so it is only through death that we 
reach the better things in the progress of our spiri- 
tual life. Not a pear would be fit to eat if it had 
not been for many previous fruits dying and thus 
reproducing themselves in better form, and it is 
owing to those previous deaths that the pear is now 
the luscious fruit that it is. And so he who would 
enter heaven and live hereafter must die — descend 
bodily into the ground that he may rise again to 
resurrection life beyond. Children, you and I must 
die, but that death, as we call it, is only a way lead- 
ing to something better. It is nothing to look upon 
with gloom and sadness. If we believe in Jesus 
Christ, if we have trusted Him as our Saviour, we 
need not fear the grave or death, whether it comes 
early or late, because it is only the transition from the 
poor, bitter, miserable fruit into the lovely, bloom- 
ing fruitage of an existence that shall be eternal. 



l88 Sermons for Great Days 

BENEDICTION 

And now may the benediction of God so descend 
upon these services that we will never forget that 
he who goeth forth with weeping bearing precious 
seed shall doubtless come again rejoicing and bring- 
ing his sheaves with him. Grant, O God, such a 
benediction of Thy spirit upon this thought and upon 
this people that we shall go out to reap, and wilt 
Thou make it sure that somewhere in time or eternity 
we shall see the ''harvest home." We ask tiiat bene- 
diction in the Master's name. Amen. 



XIII 
''Go Forward'' — A Rally Day Sermon 

(exodus XIV :i 5) 

^ND the Lord said unto Moses, wherefore cryest 
^ZjL thou unto me. Speak unto the children of 
Israel ami tell them to go fonmrdf' 

We put our hands into the hands of the Lord 
this morning and say : "Lord, lead on, we are ready/' 
As a church, we cease from our Summer wander- 
ings. We turn our attention to the great duties that 
confront us and we say, 'Tord, here we are ! Send 
us !" And the Lord sayeth unto us as He said unto 
the children of Israel, "Go Forward/' He will never 
say to us, "Sit down by the shore and wait." He 
will never say to us so long as sin is in the world, 
"Rest here in peace.'' But with each recurring year, 
with the beginning of each undertaking, He sayeth 
unto us, "Go forward!" He did not say to the 
children of Israel that they were to cease offering 
up their supplications, but He said, "Why do you 
ask my advice and then refuse to take it. It is 
time you went forward." Moses said, "Here is the 

sea with its wild billows raging, beating on the 

189 



190 Sermons for Great Days 

shore. We cannot go forward/' But again the 
voice comes down from the highest dome of heaven's 
temple, saying, ''Go forward!" But Moses sayeth, 
^'Here is the sea ; there are the mountains ; behind us 
the enemy. We are surrounded on every side with 
a wall of difficulties. Lord, what are we to do!" 
Again comes the voice, ''Go forward." 

So to-day the voice comes to you and to me, "Go 
Forward!" We sometimes long to be in a land of 
rest, and we say, "There is a rest for the people of 
God," but it is over on the other side of the river. 
We sometimes declare, "Oh, when we have finished 
this thing, we will sit dawn and rest." But as soon 
as that thing is done, God says, "No, not now ! Do 
something else." So He says to you the same thing. 

"You have been looking forward to the time when 
we would get the debt on the Church paid and you 
have thought, "Then we will rest in quietness and 
peace under our own vine and fig tree." But the 
Lord says, "No, if you sit down, the Egyptians are 
behind you, the immovable waves are before you, the 
only thing to do is to put your feet into the water," 
as He afterward commanded them in the River Jor- 
dan. 

I visited the seashore, and finding the life-saving 
station closed, I inquired for some person who could 
show me the apparatus. They told me a farmer 
back on the farm had the key. The farmer said 



''Go Forward'' 191 

that some months ago a yacht had put out from the 
harbor with a company of people on it, among them 
his brother. After they had been out a while, there 
came a severe squall which overturned the yacht and 
threw the people into the water. But all managed to 
cling to the riggings, sails or spars. In that ter- 
rible gale the sea beat over them and buried them for 
a moment with the coming tidal wave. The farmer 
was at his house watching the boat, and he ran down 
to the shore to see what could be done to help them. 
As the boat overturned, its long mast stuck in the 
sand and anchored the boat, so that every wave drove 
the mast deeper into the sand. The farmer went 
down and tried to get into the life-saving station. 
He had no key but at last he broke into the window 
and opened the door. He found there a great mor- 
tar, or a kind of a gun, into which they put a bomb 
or shot which they fire into the sky that it may fall 
beyond the vessel, and the line attached to it come 
within reach of those who are perishing. But he 
was a farmer. What did he know about artillery? 
What did he know about a life-saving station? A 
little farther in, he found an immense apparatus 
upon wheels that could be turned easily. It had a 
great many ropes, some anchors and many pulleys, 
and he anxiously ran around that and wished to 
know what that was for. But there was no person 
to tell him. He pulled at the ropes and cogs and 



192 Sermons for Great Days 

tried to separate the ropes. Then he found a num- 
ber of Hfe preservers, one of them on wheels. He 
examined them, but here they were, far back from 
the shore and his friends were out in the ocean, per- 
haps drowning even then. Here was all the appa- 
ratus to save them. The Government had expended 
many thousands of dollars for that purpose. But he 
did not know how to use it or what to do with it 
He did not dare put any powder into that mortar or 
fire it. He did not dare run the wheels of that ma- 
chine into the sea. He simply stood and trembled, 
and cried on the shore, and his brother went down 
into the sea, and his body was washed up when the 
storm was gone. This helpless man stood crying, 
surrounded by everything that was needed to save 
every person on that boat. We are in that same 
position ourselves. All around us as a Church, men 
are going down ; all about us are the sick and suffer- 
ing; all around us the ignorant; on every side the 
need of sympathy, of kindness, of Christian love; 
and we, with a mighty life-saving station, with all 
the ropes and cogs, with all the bombs and shells, 
stand and tremble, and cry, and do nothing. Yet we 
are life-savers. Your Church is composed of three- 
fourths young people, in their strength and prime, 
with all the ambitions and hopes. It is a great life- 
saving station. Your Church has in it the energy 
of active business men. It is composed of the middle 



''Go Forward'' 193 

class of the community ; not the absolutely poor, or 
the greatly wealthy. It is a great life-saving station. 
You have the public favor of the city. Never did 
a church receive such great kindness, such volun- 
tary support, such help from public opinion, from the 
public press and from society as seem to gather 
around you. A great life-saving station is here with 
everything ready to work, with all the men and 
women to use it. But men are dying still. People 
are in awful pain and suffering because no hand 
reaches them. Thousands are going into sin and 
crime because no Christian sympathizes with them. 
If this were the only church in the city, our respons- 
ibility would not be any greater than now. 

If each member of the Church were to give ten 
cents a week toward foreign missions, — 'what a 
power for good that would be! If each member 
of the Chorus were to sing one soul into the King- 
dom, that would be 3,000 people converted by them 
every year, if they only converted one a month. 
Suppose each usher were to make a friend of one 
stranger each Sunday, that one would multiply to 
1,560 strangers made friends of the Church in a 
year. If the attendants of the Societies of the 
Church were to convert one soul a month, they 
would convert 60,000 people in one year in this 
Church. Well may we talk of the responsibiHty upon 
individual Christians. Suppose each one of us 



194 Sermons for Great Days 

should visit a sick person, as Jesus went around 
visiting the sick. If each person in this Church 
visited only one a week, this Church alone would 
reach 130,000 suffering people in a year. I feel small 
when I think of the pawer of God that has dwelt 
in your midst. God says, *'Go Forward," and we 
are going. No place in this Church for lazy people 
any more. No place in this community for those 
who will not do their duty. We are for God. We 
are for humanity. We are for the sick, for the sin- 
ful; we are for the whole city. We are to save 
them all. 

Did you ever think of your power with God in 
prayer ? It is a dangerous thing to have such power 
with God. It makes you fearfully responsible for 
the manner in which you use it, for the petitions you 
make and for the things you pray for. You have 
great business force. I do not believe a member 
of the Church should lend money to another mem- 
ber of the Church and regard it as a kindness. It 
is no kindness to go around lending money. There 
is nothing on earth that makes a man hate you so 
much as to know he owes you money. The obliga- 
tion of the Church is on a wider, higher plane. Its 
obligation is that every member of the Church has 
something to do, and it is our duty tO' see that no 
member of the Church is ever out of work, and if 
you know of a position at a good salary and you 



''Go Forward'' 195 

know of a member occupying a place at a smaller 
salary, it is your privilege and duty to try and help 
that member. You have wonderful business power 
in the city, reaching out into 32 professions and 
into 82 kinds of business, many of you connected 
with the most important enterprises of the city. 
Throughout the whole city you have this effective 
social force. How are we going to use these forces ? 
What are we going to do this coming Fall and Win- 
ter with these social and spiritual machines ? 

During the Civil War, down below Chatanooga, 
the General came to one of the Massachusetts regi- 
ments and said, "I want to see if there are men in 
this regiment who can fix up this railroad so we can 
run a freight train over it by next Thursday. I have 
orders from General Sherman, and he wants it by 
next Thursday?'' We were all called out, and the 
General came down the line and said, ''What can 
YOU do T' One man said, 'T never worked on a rail- 
road, but I can drive spikes." The General said, ''Step 
out; you can drive spikes!" Each of them knew* 
something, and between them they knew about the 
whole railroad business. The General divided them 
up and said, "This man can take charge of this, and 
you of that. You go to work on the rails, and you 
on this engine, and you on that," and every man 
said, "I will do my part!" The next Thursday 
afternoon the great freight train went toward Dal- 



196 Sermons for Great Days 

las, Georgia, and when the troops came in, so hun- 
gry, oh, what a delight it was to see them rolHng 
out the biscuits and the pickles! Although no 
man knew the whole business, each man in his own 
place did his duty right there. We as a Church, 
have this great machine. We have this life-saving 
station. We have these people to save. God has 
given us apparatus of all kinds and forms. No one 
knows how to control the whole machine, but each 
of us knows how to do something, and there are 
enough of us here, so that with us all, we know all 
about it. God says, *'Go Forward," and if we are 
to go forward from this Rally Day on, each member 
of the Church must do his own individual duty in 
his own place, drive the spikes or repair the engine. 
God calls to you from the sky and says, "Why cryest 
thou unto me? Say unto Israel, Go Forward.'' You 
cannot escape the awful responsibility God has placed 
upon you in this Church. 

I could pray God sincerely that I had a small 
fchurch; that I was back in the country town in a 
small church. I could pray God sincerely at this 
hour that God would let me retire to some place 
where there were few people and where the great 
interests of the community were not so tied to the 
on-going machine of a great church. I could ask 
Him to shift this responsibility to some better hands 
and stronger minds. But we cannot escape. Our 



''Go Forward'' 197 

shoulders are under the building; it will fall unless 
you and I lift it, and if you lift, and I lift, it will not 
be a difficult undertaking. We may not be able to 
rest this side of glory, but we will feel that we have 
not been cowards or deserters. Lord, we put our 
hands again in Thine. Go ON ! We are ready to 
follow. We will do what we can. 



XIV 
Thanksgiving Sacrifice 

(psalms cvii:22) 

MY text this morning is in the 107th Psalm 
and the 22d verse : 

''Let them sacrifice the sacrifices of thanksgiving 
and declare His works with rejoicing/' 

The sacrifice of thanksgiving, under the Old 
Testament dispensation, was an offering of some- 
thing that was valuable to the owner. It was a sheep 
or a bullock that would have brought a high price 
in the market. And the thanksgiving offerings 
made in those days were made from the very best 
they had, and were voluntary offerings, or free will, 
and, unlike many other offerings, it was not required 
to be made at stated seasons. The thank offering 
was made whenever a man felt disposed to do it. It 
was a free-will offering, of his own accord, made at 
a time when he felt especially thankful to the Lord. 
Then he brought the best of his flocks and offered it 
unto the Lord. Other offerings were systematic 
and were made at stated intervals throughout the 

year in the Temple. It was an offering they made 

198 



Thanksgiving Sacrifice 199 

just before a feast. If a man had occasion to give 
a great feast; if his family had been well married; 
if a son had been born in the family ; if a great bless- 
ing in the way of business prosperity had reached 
him, — then he gave a feast and invited his friends. 
But before he sat down at the feast he carried to 
the temple, or sent, a thank offering, being unwill- 
ing to feast himself until he had first thanked God 
for the blessings which led to the feast. 

Now the text, which I cannot present to-day as 
it should be presented, has within it a spiritual idea 
which Christ evidently sought to evolve from it. 
When Jesus abolished the Old Testament system 
He did not do away with the spirit of the law. He 
discontinued these thank offerings in the form of 
sheep or bullocks, but He came to fulfil in the spirit 
what was done before in the letter. He did not 
abolish our thanksgiving offering; on the contrary, 
He enforced the spirit of it. You remem.ber how He 
told His disciples that when they brought their gifts 
to the altar, if they remembered that they had aught 
against another, or he against them, they were to go 
first and be reconciled with that brother, and then 
offer the gift. It enforced the same spirit which w^as 
supposed to be behind the Old Testament provision. 

Then, when Jesus was describing the final judg- 
ment. He said, ''Inasmuch as ye have done it unto 
the least of these, my brethren, ye have done it unto 



200 Sermons for Great Days 

me." We were to still worship God and to make 
thank offerings, but the way we were to express our 
thanksgiving was to do some deed of helpfulness to 
these. His brethren, on the earth. He simply 
changed the form and not the spirit of the thanks- 
giving offering. 

We have come to this Thanksgiving week in the 
history of our lives, and we ask ourselves, "What is 
it to be religiously thankful? What ought we to 
do?" In this text we have this express command, 
"Let them sacrifice the sacrifice of thanksgiving.'' 
If we are to sacrifice, let us do it now, before we 
feast. 

One of the dear old Quakers of your own state, 
of whom I read with interest years ago, always went 
to his Thanksgiving dinner by the way of a little 
side room, where he knelt for a few moments in 
prayerful thanksgiving and put in a small box the 
amount to a cent which the Thanksgiving dinner 
had cost him and his family. Then was his con- 
science clear; then was he comforted by the thought 
that he had made his sacrifice offering to God, and 
he went to this simple, plain feast of the Friends 
with a delight, and a joy of soul, peace of mind, and 
rest of body such as another could not have known. 
Jesus taught the principle that it was right to feast, 
but that we were to go to that feast by the way of 
sacrifice. 



Thanksgiving Sacrifice . 201 

O my friends! how few people thank the Lord! 
How few really good men there are in this world! 
There are half-good ones ! There are half-hearted 
ones! There are half-learned ones, but how few 
come up to the utmost standard of what Christ sets 
here as possible. How few true offerings there are, 
and how sacred are these few ! It is a very curious 
thing that the Lord makes ten thousand miUions of 
seeds for every one tree that grows from the seed, 
and so He makes ten thousand human beings in 
order to get one real man. It seems a very curious 
thing that He should have wasted (apparently to 
us, but not to Him) His strength, that there should 
be so few real sacrifices made, so few real men, full 
men, complete men, out of all the millions that the 
Lord brings into being. 

How many trees there are! If any of you own 
a farm, you have found out how many trees grow 
there which bear no fruit. You have about six 
trees to one apple, as a rule, nowadays. The trees 
grow where you don't want them, all around, by the 
fence and on the roads. You have all the trees, 
but when you go out in the Fall season and ought 
to find fruit, you find only here and there an apple, 
only here and there a tree that bears fruit. So many 
men there are in the world who are supposed to bear 
fruit, but so few actually bear the fruit for which 
they are intended. How many of us have prayed 



202 Sermons for Great Days 

and prayed that we might be counted among those 
who are worthy to be esteemed His disciples, and 
yet there are only a sacred few. Christ Himself 
said to His disciples, 'Tray the Lord of the harvest 
that He send laborers into his vineyard.'' "The har- 
vest surely is plentiful, but the laborers are few," 
Jesus said to them. When there were already hun- 
dreds of Christian human beings on the earth, Jesus 
said to them, ''The laborers indeed are few.'' 

How few make the sacrifice of thanksgiving dur- 
ing this Thanksgiving week in its best form ! How 
many express their gratitude to God beyond words 
and prayers ! Now, this is Thanksgiving week. We 
profess to be thankful. We praise God and thank 
Him for His mercies untold, but what fruit do we 
bear? Why, we grow up in the spring, we put on 
our green leaves, and we spread forth our blossoms 
of thanksgiving, but when this week is gone and 
God asks us, "Where is the fruit?" we must answer, 
"There is no fruit !" All the flowers blasted ! Noth- 
ing but words ! Nothing but form ! No offerings, 
no real sacrifice to God ! 

Once in a while I hear of some heroic deed in 
connection with my life work in educating or help- 
ing to educate young men. I heard of one who gave 
me a high opinion of a young man's gratitude. An 
old farmer in New Hampshire assisted this young 
man to go to Harvard College, and when he had 



Thanksgiving Sacrifice 203 

finished his course in Harvard he desired to go to 
Europe. He secured a scholarship which would have 
paid his tuition in one of the great universities of 
Europe. His goods were packed and he had pro- 
cured his ticket to sail, when he heard that the dear 
old farmer was very sick and his crops were ready 
for the harvest. When he heard the facts, that the 
farmer was sick and that the harvest was ready on 
that farm in New Hampshire, where it was so diffi- 
cult to obtain help, he returned his ticket at a dis- 
count and took a train for the farm. Although he 
had been a student all his life, he went right out in 
the clothes of a farmer and harvested the crops dur- 
ing that season. When the next Spring time came 
he had an opportunity again, for they always come 
to such men as these, and he went to Europe with a 
brighter view, a lighter heart and an ambition puri- 
fied and blessed indeed by the offering he made to 
that old benefactor. This young man was suffi- 
ciently appreciative of what his benefactor had done 
for him to go there and actually gather his crops 
under the heated sun, exposing himself for the bene- 
factor. We all honor a man who will do that. Of 
course that man will go to the highest places ! He 
will be honored and loved on every hand. Now, 
that was an excellent disposition. But suppose when 
he heard that the man's harvest was going to be 
lost he had written a beautiful letter of condolence! 



204 Sermons for Great Days 

Suppose with all his college training and rhetorical 
discipline he had composed a poem and sent it to the 
old farmer, wishing him all manner of prosperity 
and even praying for it! Suppose he had done all 
that, he would have been like many of us Chris- 
tians, — we have done the same thing toward God. 
God blessed us; we know it and feel it, and we are 
very thankful to-day, — so that we are ready to offer 
up our wordy thanksgiving, — but not the sacrifice! 

How many persons now say ''thank you,'' although 
some are so stingy in their words that they leave 
off the "you" and simply say ''thanks" ! But what 
is that in the sight of God but an unfruitful tree ! 

I was told last Wednesday nigrht about a leading 
pastor of the country. He was born in Scotland, of 
poor parentage, and had but little opportunity to 
secure an education. He came to this country as 
a young man, and he was at work in a livery stable, 
trying to earn an honest living. He drove out to 
a small pond near New York with an old gentleman 
who ventured out on the ice to see the skaters. The 
ice gave way, and many of the skaters were precipi- 
tated into the cold water. The old gentleman was 
also overturned in the water and exposed to the dan- 
gers of death. The driver left his horse and waded 
as far as he could, and then, pushing aside the ice, 
swam out and saved this old gentleman, with two or 
three others. When he placed the man in the car- 



Thanksgiving Sacrifice 205 

riage, he wrapped him in his own overcoat and then 
he wrapped him in the robes, and drove hastily to 
a house nearby where the gentleman was acquainted. 
The saved man said, *'What shall I give you?'' The 
driver replied, ^*Nothing." The gentleman said, 
"What is your name?" "No matter,'' he replied, 
"I have only done my duty in the matter, and I don't 
want to be known. I am glad you are saved." He 
went back to the livery stable. It was more than 
two years after that when the old gentleman saw 
him again down at Castle Garden and recognized 
him as the youth that had saved him. He ran and 
called after him and said, "Won't you come to my 
house? I want to see you." He gave the young 
man his card, and, after considerable hesitation, the 
young man presented himself at the door and was 
ushered in by the servant. He was taken right into 
the open parlors and dining-room, in the midst of a 
great party. There were assembled the richest, the 
wealthiest, the most fashionable people of New York. 
The ladies were dressed in the completeness of fine 
drapery. Their eyes were bright, their cheeks 
flushed, their voices happy. The scene was fascinat- 
ing, and completely overwhelmed the mind of the 
young man, who had never seen such bright lights 
and such flashing eyes. The daughter of the owner 
of the mansion said, "Who is that?" The servant 
said, "He is the one that your father sent for." 



2o6 Sermons for Great Days 

''Oh!'' she said, ''that Is the young man that saved 
my father/' She rushed forward to him in the midst 
of all that company, with all her array of fashionable 
attire and brilliant diamonds, and expressed to him 
her joy that she had found him. She brought him 
right up to the table and introduced him to the 
people, to his great dismay, terror and pain. "Cer- 
tainly, bring him in here! Of course he is not 
dressed for a party, as he knew nothing of it, but 
bring him right in here and give him a seat at the 
table!" One of the wealthiest men of New York 
said, "You must have this place," and then went 
and asked the servant to bring in again the course 
that had already passed. At last, in his confusion, 
he managed to get out and he begged them to let 
him go. But this daughter of the millionaire bade 
him good-bye and said, "We will always be glad to 
see you. You will always be welcome in this house." 
Oh! how many a fashionable girl, even if all her re- 
lations would have been saved, would on a fashion- 
able occasion like that have spurned to speak to the 
ordinary young man. But this daughter's gratitude 
went further. She asked her father to help that 
young man secure an education, and he obtained it. 
First he went to a preparatory school in New York, 
and then to Princeton University, and afterward he 
married the young lady, and they now live in a mag- 
nificent mansion, and last Wednesday night I was 



Thanksgiving Sacrifice 207 

introduced to the family of this successful preacher^ 
whose benefactions are so extensive and who has the 
assistance of that lovely and noble wife in all his 
work. I thought of that story, and thought how 
many thousands of young ladies there are who in 
the midst of their fashionable gatherings would have 
thought it a social disgrace to have welcomed any 
man not attired in a ''dress suit." God makes a 
thousand human females to one real woman. 

But it is just as true of churches as it is of indi- 
viduals. I was interested yesterday in meeting the 
Methodist brethren in Baltimore as they assembled 
to consult over their missionary work. How many 
churches they have, as we have, in this country 
which, like the trees on my farm, grow up green 
and blossom, but they have no fruit. We gather so 
few final results. That is the history of our churches 
all over the land. 

There is a man near Westfield, Mass., who, in 
memory of his father, keeps the old sawmill just as 
it was when his father died. The buzz saw is pol- 
ished every day, and the dam is kept complete, and 
the gate is complete, and the wheel is repaired, — 
everything ready to run. It has been there I know 
not how long, but for quite a number of years, but 
it has not been through a single log in all those years, 
yet it has been polished and kept in complete condi- 
tion to do the work it never does. 



2o8 Sermons for Great Days 

Like a woman who makes up dresses and never 
wears them, it is the disposition of the church to 
spend all its strength in preparing to do something. 
We have our prayer meetings. What for? What 
is the purpose? Jesus Christ said He came into 
this world to save the world, and the Apostle Paul, 
representing the highest aim of Christianity, said, 
**This is a faithful saying and worthy of all accepta- 
tion, that Jesus Christ came into the world to save 
sinners/' That is the chief purpose of the church, 
and yet you will find churches in this country where 
they hold the prayer meeting for a whole year with- 
out one attempt to save anybody, — without a thought 
that they are there to save any soul. They come 
together and make their prayers and their short 
speeches, and prepare themselves for a work they 
never think* of doing. It never occurs to them that 
it can be done ! 

How many societies we have in this church in 
which they are going through the same polishing 
of the saw; just the same repairing of the wheel; 
just the same keeping of the dam and reservoir in 
order! What is the Christian Endeavor Society for? 
It is to save sinners. That is the aim ! That is the 
whole of it! But the Christian Endeavor Society 
says, "We wish to be trained in prayer, in Christian 
work." If the Christian Endeavor Society has been 
prepa/ring itself for five years, why don't they do 



Thanksgiving Sacrifice 209 

actual Christian work now? Why does it not 
gather some sinners ? Why does it not go after some 
lost soul and thus bring forth the fruit for which it 
has been preparing? Why is not that the harvest 
of all the different societies in this church? 

We have a great church ! We have prepared this 
institution ! We have gotten it ready for the great 
harvest, and the harvest is as fully prepared as we, 
yet we will go and hear Mr. Conwell preach, and 
the chorus sing, and then we will go home and think 
we have done the whole, when we are only just 
getting ready for work, — ^when we have only just 
come to the point where we can do something. We^ 
go out of this church with the idea that we wish 
to do better. Those of you who have witnessed 
this baptism this morning have a wish that you 
might reconsecrate yourselves to the Lord, and yet 
when you gti out into the rain it will dampen the 
whole purpose, and you will come next Sunday the 
same. It has all been wasted, because you do not 
carry out the purpose for which Christ died and for 
which His church was instituted. 

There was a man in Pennsylvania whom I always 
delighted to meet, who always found his way to his 
Thanksgiving dinner by the the way of his old 
mother's home. He took his mother something good 
and then went to his own Thanksgiving feast. Let 
no man who wants to serve God go to his Thanks- 



210 Sermons for Great Days 

giving dinner this year without doing something for 
those whom Christ loves. It is the way to keep 
Thanksgiving. If a man this week, having in mind 
the hospital work for the good of those suffering 
poor for whom Christ died — if a man say, *'I will 
do something for that hospital before I eat my 
Thanksgiving dinner," and do it, O ! then he will 
make the ''sacrifice of thanksgiving.'' 

A man is not sincerely thankful until he is ready 
to make some positive sacrifice. Not far from here 
a man belonging to another church never eats his 
Thanksgiving dinner without hanging up a turkey 
in sight which he is going to give to somebody else. 
While it is a peculiar way of expressing it, it does 
express the great truth that I am trying to evolve 
this morning: that we, in order to be really thank- 
ful to God, need be thankful enough to express it 
in charitable deeds. 

All w^ho believe in the Lord Jesus Christ have 
everlasting life, but baptism is the test of that belief. 
If one believes in Jesus Christ enough to be baptized, 
then he is sure that he has believed enough to be 
saved. If a man is thankful enough to Christ for his 
blessings to his family so as to express it in some 
deed before his fellowmen, then he makes the true 
''sacrifice of thanksgiving"; then he goes to God 
with an offering that will be acceptable. 



Thanksgiving Sacrifice 21 1 

When Christ sat at that well at Samaria, waiting 
for His disciples to bring Him something to eat, a 
soul came that way. He came into the world to save 
souls, and when that woman of Samaria came, He 
talked with her until He was refreshed. He had 
meat to eat that they knew not of. 

You can eat a Thanksgiving dinner for yourself 
after you have carried one to some poor people. 
Then you, too, can make your Thanksgiving dinner 
a spiritual feast. If you have made some one else 
happier or better in the name of Jesus Christ, you 
won't need all the luxuries heaped on your table. 
Christ talked to that soul at the well and pointed 
her to the Lord. Then He did not care for His 
dinner. It was of no more value to Him, because 
no feast could add to his exultant joy. 

We ought to be thankful enough to bear fruit 
indeed. As a church we ought to be a saving people. 
As a society we ought to be a saving people. As in- 
dividual Christians we ought to be saving souls. 
As lovers of God, and grateful for His goodness, 
we ought to worship Him by positive open sacrifice 
of something of value to us. The sacrifice should be 
real, practical, personal — the giving up of something 
for the good of some one else — and that "sacrifice 
of thanksgiving'' will make your Thanksgiving Day 
the happiest you have ever seen, unless you have 
practiced this often before. 



212 Sermons for Great Days 

BENEDICTION 

O Lord ! we know that whether we have little or 
much ourselves on Thanksgiving Day, that it will 
be a very completely happy day if we have made 
some sacrifice for Thy sake, and for the sake of our 
fellowmen as an ''offering of thanksgiving." O 
Jesus! inspire us with a sense of our obligation as 
sinners, to rise higher than mere words, into the 
realm of deeds, where we bring of the best of that 
which we love most, and sacrifice it gladly for Thy 
service, and as an expression of our obligation to 
Thee. Nov/ may mercy and peace from God the 
Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit abide with us 
as through this week we try to make some distinct 
offering in His Name. Amen. 



XV 
A Christmas Thought 

(MATTHEW Villi I ) 

IN the 7th chapter of Matthew and in the nth 
verse is the remark of the Saviour concerning 
the goodness of God to man : 

''If ye then, being evil, know how to give good 
gifts unto your children, how much more shall your 
Father which is in heaven give good things to them' 
that ask Himf 

This wonderful Book gives us information con- 
cerning a thousand things. Out of a single verse, 
and out of this one verse, we get a great many sug- 
gestions of wisdom which apply to all conditions of 
life. I select this remark of Christ, this illustration 
of His, to show His interest and the interest of 
God in the Christmxas season — the season when 
people have been in the habit of making presents one 
to another, and to their families. 

The time is now approaching when all people 

think of the Christmas season. Whether they be 

Jew or Gentile this season appeals to every heart. 

It has its place in the economies of our business, its 

213 



214 Seimons for Great Days 

place in our worship, its place in our home, and its 
approval in our conscience. 

Jesus says: ''If ye know how to give good 
gifts — ." It requires remarkable wisdom to know 
that. It should have much more study than we have 
time to give to it if we studied until Christmas day. 
It is a season of mighty influence for good. It is a 
time when a man makes a great many friends, or 
loses them. It is a time of prosperity, or a time of 
loss. It is a decisive season just before the first of 
January. So important is the Christmas thought 
that it cannot be considered out of place for me to 
discuss it for a few minutes frankly and plainly. 

If a man is going to give a Christmas present, his 
first thought should be whether he has the money or 
the property to make a suitable present. The Lord 
jsays unto us, "Owe no man anything/' It meant, 
of course, in its spiritual interpretation that we are 
never to get in debt beyond our ability to pay. It 
does not say that we should not mortgage our houses. 
It does not say that we should not secure credit. 
Nothing of that is in the thought, but the thought, 
as the apostle expressed it, when you view it in con- 
nection with what precedes and what follows, is that 
we are not to go in debt where we have not the means 
to pay. That is the kind of owing that is condemned 
of the Scripture. If you should owe, before 
Christmas, more bills than you are able to pay, which 



A Christmas Thought 215 

are already due, you have no right to make a present 
at all. It is wrong, by the teaching of your con- 
science, as well as of the Bible, to give away other 
people's money. If all the money you hold is now 
due to some person, then you owe that, and you are 
commanded to "Owe no man anything." 

Laying thus the cornerstone of my thought on that 
foundation, I would emphasize it by a different state- 
ment, but, in fact, a repetition. If a church is in 
debt for bills overdue more than it can now pay, it 
has no right to give away anything, not even to the 
poor. If a company in business owe more than 
the realization of their stocks and their securities 
would pay, it is a crime (it is counted so by the law 
of man, and it certainly is so by the law of God), 
for that firm to make a present of anything at 
Christmas time. If an individual finding himself 
in debt should give way to the temptation, for the 
pride that is in his soul, to take money that belongs 
to other people, and present it to his family, or pre- 
sent it to his acquaintance, he is using another man's 
money just as much as though he put his hand in 
his friend's pocket and stole it from his pocketbook. 
If a man were to buy an establishment worth a mil- 
lion dollars, and give a mortgage on it for five thou- 
sand dollars, that five thousand dollars is no debt. 
He has plenty with which to pay it, and that would 



2l6 Sermons for Great Days 

in no wise interfere with his presents. But it is the 
owing of bills due that we cannot pay. 

The importance of this may be emphasized by an 
illustration. A family years ago had only seven dol- 
lars for Christmas, for they were scrupulously out 
of debt. They had only seven dollars left, and they 
sat down together to- discuss what they would do 
with that seven dollars, how to distribute it, how 
much could be invested for one, and how much for 
another ; none were left unnoticed. If you have never 
sat down with only seven dollars for your Christmas 
and tried to decide how you would distribute that 
among a great many friends, you have lost one of 
the perplexities of human life. ''How shall the 
seven dollars be invested so as to do the most good, 
please the greatest number of friends, and suit our 
own pride in the matter?" They laid out fifty 
cents in one place for one child, sixty cents for an- 
other, a dollar for another, then so much for grand- 
mother, so much for an uncle, then a certain sum 
for a neighbor that had been very, very kind, and 
they came up to the last one cent. When only one 
penny was left, they said: "What will we do with 
that?" The greatest puzzle was what to do with 
that last cent. They said : ''Let us send it to a friend 
living far away in a letter, and tell him that is all we 
have, that we have sent all there was left to him." 
The letter was sent, in a half facetious way, but it 



A Christmas Thought 217 

was taken in the most beautiful spirit. The man 
took that penny and invested it, reinvesting it, and 
kept on re-investing it, and it went on through the 
years. He, a bachelor, living in California, with de- 
light watched the growth of that penny in his invest- 
ments and speculations from one sum tO' another, 
until when the years had rolled around, the old home 
in the East was gone, the children were scattered, 
and the old folks were living with one of the daugh- 
ters far away from the old homestead, there came 
news that the relative in California had died, and 
had left them the proceeds of that single penny. In 
his will he expressed his gratitude to them that they 
did not send him more, but that they sent him ''all 
they had/' The exact amount he left them I do 
not remember, and need not, for this illustration. 
But it was a very large fortune they had really 
gained from that penny. That gift of one cent was 
the best of all. It was the gift of a single penny, but 
it was given in that spirit, and with that motive 
which made it so powerful a gift at that precious 
Christmas season. 

A young man was engaged to be married, and he 
desired very much tO' give his intended a diamond 
ring for an engagement ring. He had told his 
friends outside he was going to do that, and that 
he was going to get the money from an investment 
he had. But when he came to seek for his invest- 



2i8 Sermons for Great Days 

ment it was lost. Then he tried to borrow. He went 
to a friend, and told him he wished to borrow the 
money to buy this ring. His friend said to him: 
"Charles, take an old man's advice. Don't buy a 
diamond ring for your intended bride, but go to her 
like a man and 'tell her you did intend to do so, but 
that you have not the means to do it unless you bor- 
row, and you are not willing to go in debt. Go tell 
her frankly, that that is your situation. If she 
would refuse you because of your poverty now, or 
because of your manly truthfulness, then she does 
not deserve you. You are better off without her. 
Go tell her like a man." The young man did go to 
the woman and told her he had lost what little invest- 
ment he had, that he had lost it all. If she would be 
satisfied with one for a less amount he would buy 
it with his wages the next Saturday evening. What 
a noble thing that was to do, and how difficult for 
him — any man who has been engaged to be married, 
will understand. She appreciated his manly truth- 
fulness. She loved him more, and respected him far 
more highly for the position he took. When he 
bought a little plain ring that cost so small a sum, 
she was more delighted than she could have been 
with a magnificent diamond. It taught him a great 
truth; it taught her a great truth. 

A young man finding he could buy nothing of any 
especial value without going in debt, sat down and 



A Christmas Thought 219 

made a footstool evenings. He carved it as nicely as 
he could, put it together with great skill, and then 
took that to his intended bride as his Christmas 
present, and said: *This is of but little value, but 
I made it myself/' It was only a few years ago 
that the man died. He left in connection with the 
investments for the libraries of New York over 
eight millions of dollars. At his funeral the old 
gray-haired bride brought out the old stool that he 
made as his first present to her. It looked so rude 
in all their rich surroundings, for on the wall there 
was a single picture that could have bought ten thou- 
sand footstools like that, yet all the years she had 
kept it treasured up as an evidence of his affection 
for her. Though he had given her diamonds, and 
had given her everything that riches could confer 
upon a loved woman, yet to her the dearest thing, 
and which she showed with the greatest affection 
when he had gone, was that simple footstool which 
he "made himself.'' 

If we are to make a Christmas present, as Christ 
suggests, it should be given with a certain right 
motive. The motive is everything. If you make a 
present you should make it with a motive of con- 
ferring upon him a blessing, so that that present 
when it reaches him shall be a matter of inspiration, 
shall be a matter of instruction, or shall be to him 



220 Sermons for Great Days 

an especial value, so that the person to whom you 
give shall be benefited by what you confer. 

It is too plain, too simple to admit of much dis- 
cussion, but it is so plain and so simple that very 
few of us ever follow the Christian plan. The 
Christian plan is to be of benefit to those who would 
help, and so we must study with care what we give. 

You know that when they sent to the Indians 
some presents in the early days of the settlers the 
Indians sent back bundles of arrows, which indicated 
war, which was an insult to those who had com- 
municated with them. It meant war, and such a 
present as that is an insult. 

A man should send some part of himself; that is, 
something that is his own. You know that when 
that man wrote from the prison in France to his 
king, with the blood he had taken from his own veins 
in that celebrated letter, he said, 'This is my heart's 
bloode" Oh, how much that meant to the king. He 
had taken his own blood, something of himself, and 
put it into his letter. He should have sent at that 
time his love, as well as allegiance, and he did it all 
by putting in his own heart's blood. O to have 
something of yourself go with your present, some- 
thing of your own taste, some of your own love. 
In our Bazaar in the lower halls there are handker- 
chiefs and other gifts sent by the wife of the Presi- 
dent of the United States, and by Miss Crosby, the 



A Christmas Thought 221 

sweet singer of Israel, now in her ninety- fourth 
year, in Bridgeport, Conn. When we think of those 
presents sent by distinguished individuals, of what 
value are they? Intrinsically, of very little value, 
and yet when you look upon them and the cards of 
the people attached to them, you naturally think of 
the person who sent them. Who sent them ? When 
we find that the great singer who had written so 
many hymns for our hymn book, sent a gift, we 
find she sent a suggestion of poetry, of age in its 
glory and beauty, of the home of the angels so near 
to her. On the other hand, from the White House 
comes a handkerchief, and it suggests to us, the wife 
of the President, and the President. So each article 
is attached to the personality and associations of the 
giver back of it. Because of their associations, there 
is a vast difference in the good that they will do. 
If you bought one of those handkerchiefs and made 
it a Christmas present to a friend, you would send 
an entirely different influence with one from what 
you would have sent if you had sent the other. 

When you visit a library given by Mr. Carnegie, 
what do you think about that present to your com- 
munity? It brings you what thoughts? Thoughts 
of speculation, thoughts of working men who have 
earned all that money, thoughts of the fact that he 
has had far more than his share of this world's 
goods. It brings you to the fact that he gives it, 



222 Sermons for Great Days 

and attaches his name to it. It brings you the 
thought that he is a man of the world who beheves 
this world is all, and says he doesn't believe in the 
Bible, the Church or Christ. He told me he did not. 
That library brings you that thought every time you 
pass it if you know its history. Those books are 
valuable, the instruction they give is valuable, but 
are they also' associated with such a giver? You 
can question the value of all such generosity, so- 
called, to the world because of its association with 
the giver. If George Washington had given it, or 
if some saintly man who had lived and sacrificed for 
the cause of humanity had given it, it might have a 
far different influence upon human character. 

I use these illustrations only to show that a gift 
carries with it the character of the giver. You must 
be careful when you send a gift that you can send 
with it yourself, a noble, upright Christian charac- 
ter, a character that loves the things that are holy 
and righteous, a character that hates the things that 
are evil and wrong, a character that stands for the 
right always, and against evil always. You must 
send that with your present, or your present will be 
of little or no value. 

A young lady may receive a present from a thief, 
or a libertine, or have it sent to her. If she knows 
from whom it comes, she indignantly sends it back, 
or hurls it into the street, because it is a damage to 



A Christmas Thought 223 

her to receive it. That is an extreme case, but every 
single person has something of that on one side or 
the other. Consequently, in giving your Christmas 
present, you are sending yourself whether you will 
or no with your present. 

So then the first duty in giving a present is to 
have the heart right, and it illustrates the great gos- 
pel truth that at Christmas season God expects us 
to give something to Him. Our Heavenly Father 
expects us to make an offering — a gift to Him, and 
we sit down and take an account of stock to see what 
we can give. The only thing that is of any value to 
Him is our own personal identity — our soul. It is 
the only thing he cares for. All His entire valua- 
tion of a man is in his soul, and in that soul's char- 
acter. If we are going to make a present to God, 
we must take an account of stock and see what kind 
of a present we can give Him, see if we can make 
it better, or if we can bring it in such a way that it 
will be more acceptable to Him. The great question 
in connection with our gifts is : What is our duty to 
our God? Christmas is coming, and when it comes 
let us make a present to the Almighty. The .only 
thing we can give him is our own soul, and let us 
give Him those souls in such a condition, in such 
contrition for wrongdoing, in such a motive for 
doing future righteousness, that it will be acceptable 
to him. He will see a character coming with those 



224 Sermons for Great Days 

presents of contrition, a character of humble sub- 
mission to His will, which will make it a beautiful 
gift to God. On Christmas we give ourselves to 
God. 

There was a man living in southern California 
a few years ago whose name I think was Louis 
Westcott Beck. He had a little dog he called Rufus. 
One day he was lost in the desert of southern Cali- 
fornia, one hundred miles from any habitation, in 
that driving sand, where the mirrors of lakes deceive, 
and where there is no water. It was the night be- 
fore Christmas, and as he lay there on the sands 
suffering so much for water he promised the Lord if 
permitted to live to the next day, he would give him- 
self to the Lord as a Christmas present. The next 
day he was found by a traveler, and relieved, and he 
kept his faith. If you had the Youth's Companion 
I don't think you could read anything more interest- 
ing than the life of Westcott Beck and his dog 
Rufus. That great desert has seen the bones of 
thousands. Thousands of men, women and chil- 
dren have been lost on it, and have died of thirst, 
and their bones have been found in the driving sand 
for all these years since California was settled. 
When going through that desert on the Southern 
Pacific Railroad, you look far out upon the sand 
and see the mirrored lakes, which are only an imi- 



A Christmas Thought 225 

tation. There are no lakes there. The old lakes 
are all dried up. I was told that Mr. Beck, giving 
himself to God and humanity, asked on that Christ- 
mas day what he could do for God. What could 
he do ? Then he thought how he would like to save 
other suffering people who had suffered as he had 
suffered. He give himself to God, and said : 'T will 
do this humble thing, this one thing — devote my life 
to the saving of travelers across this desert. Now 
from day to day, and year to year, he goes over that 
desert setting guide-posts here and there, and some- 
times leaving a little dried meat and food at a certain 
place, so that for the last four years not a single 
traveler has been lost upon that great desert, so far 
as is known, because Beck's guideposts can be found 
every mile or two over that hundred-mile stretch of 
desert. He and his dog have become the good Sa- 
maritans of southern California. He devoted him- 
self to the Lord, and then he asked God what he 
should do, and concluded that was his task and de- 
voted himself to that beautiful self-sacrificing work. 
Christmas is coming to you and to me, and we 
are to give God a present. If we do, we will conse- 
crate ourselves to some one branch of work on 
Christmas day, and not only try to bring Him a pure 
heart and a clean conscience, but also a determina- 
tion that our lives shall be of greater value to Him 



226 Sermons for Great Days 

than they have been in the past, so that we reach 
as a culmination to the Saviour's teaching here, not 
only how we should give Christmas presents to 
friends, but also how we should give ourselves as a 
present unto the living God. 



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